NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Starmer and Labour have quite a lot to gain, too. And I say that as someone who has been very critical of them.
At the moment it looks bleak for Labour as they’re staring down the barrel of more tax rises and greater defence spending. But if they’re able to land the big stuff, and by that I mean a sensible reshaping of European relations and a controlled approach to immigration, I am starting to wonder if Reform’s shtick will become very old hat fairly quickly. Particularly if the general public blames the US for all this.
That’s not to say they have an easy ride, or that I necessarily expect them to deliver in a competent way, but the path forward is there for them.
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Ukraine has been betrayed by anyone, it's the likes of Germany with their utterly mad addiction to Russian energy over recent years.
Da Libz won't call out their friends.
Only their enemies.
You can’t just blame Germany . The west as a whole should have done more when Russia took Crimea.
Europe's abject failure to prepare for the return of Trump - which some of us have been calling out for years - encompasses governments of all political persuasions, including the last UK one.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
There do seem to be a lot of right wing snowflakes around. Concerning.
Trump has betrayed Ukraine. He has defied the rule of law. He has sought to subvert democracy. He does not believe in free speech or free trade. His actions run directly contrary to vital UK economic, defence and security interests in a way that we have not seen from a US President in living memory. They know all this. But they cannot compute it. They cannot accept they got him totally wrong and they cannot admit that continuing to back him means taking sides against the UK. Their choice is to put "owning the libs" before their country. And so they lash out.
How is it a betrayal? DJT doesn’t owe Ukraine shit. He never said he was going to save them or continue funding them.
You can construct an argument that his policy is morally, politically or strategically flawed but it's not a betrayal.
He could just F*** off and leave them alone but conspiring with that other megolamanic shit to try and rob the country of all it's land , minerals, etc just shows what an absolute piece of sh*t he really is. Wait till the Chinese start flexing in the Pacific etc, we will see if the spacehopper is such a bigshot then.
Didn't US commit to Ukr's security in 1990s in exchange for them giving up nuclear weapons left from soviet era?
They gave them up and now they are being betrayed.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Has there been much from the Conservatives?
Yes. Kemi went to the ARC conference and said pronouns and DEI were the greatest threat to Western civilisation. I'm not making that up.
Faggots are a genuinely nice British dish - hearty, tasty, peppery. They’ve been ruined by the invasion of the American connotation of the name
To really confuse the Americans we should rename faggots “gaylords”, or maybe even “homos”
Faggots. pork scratchings and mild - the Black Country's three great contributions to lobal cuisine.
When I lived in Wolverhampton I used to love Banks's Mild. It's a really good pint.
Mild isn't good marketing though. I suggested they rename it something like Pitbull in order to increase sales.
There was a good campaign for Mild about 30 years ago - I remember the poster of a woman focusing on her high but clunky heel, with the slogan 'Mildly exciting' - there were other 'Mildly's too. It was quite good. Still find it an unpleasant drink though. And I'm the prime market for unfashionable and old-fashioned beer. I'm generally positive about stouts and porters and the like. But not mild. Mildly unpalatable.
I'm guessing either OSA or libel, for those are very easy to breach in this country if you're not careful.. Tbh if/when people are banned a bold note from @PBModerator on the reason for the ban would be handy..
Blanche ran foul of the ban on discussion of grooming, which we've been warned about several dozen times. No idea about felix.
Sandpit will, I hope, be back soon. Ukraine is quite personal for him, so ad homs and/or amateur psychoanalysis are uncalled for.
Yes. Unlike most people here it is very personal for him and for him to be regularly abused for his opinion and one person even called him a Pro-Putin shill, that is really going too far.
As someone else said. We post here for fun. Where's the fun in coming here, putting forward a view, and being attacked on a daily basis for it by the same character ?
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Has there been much from the Conservatives?
Good question. We live in strange times. It doesn't matter what the Conservatives say, no-one is noticing and they are 19th in the polls. For domestic politics it matters a lot what Farage/Reform's position is. And at this moment I am not certain what it is. That is indicative.
The government's position has to be a bit ambiguous, rightly, because they are the government and have to act without, if possible, finding itself blocked off in a cul de sac. FWIW I think so far the government, with a lousy hand, have been OK. Early days however.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
I do hope we have one of those pro-Putin LDs on here. Would be fascinating to examine in more detail. Maybe one of our Saturday visitors?
Zelenskyy is illegitimate due to his poor record on potholes and insufficient PR?
He's done little for active travel and his approach to cycle paths leaves a lot to be desired.
There's fair amount of active travel in the Kursk region.
Putin has compromised by not requiring its return!
Perhaps it was the threat of SKS boots
If you belive Kyiv was the capital of Russia you have drunk the kool aid. Russia is the successor state to Muscovy, I believe Ivan the Terrible was the first to claim to be Tsar of all Russia. Muscovy was a relocation of the Grand Duchy of Vladimir and Suzdal, which was a tributory state of what is now known as Kyivan Rus. It broke up quite quickly into successor states of which Vladimir-Suzdal was originally fairly minor, there were plenty of other including in Ukraine such as Galicia-Volhynia and Chernihiv. At that time "Rus" meant the whole East Slavic people, who later diverged into Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians. Ukraine had quite different genesis from current Russia - it was formed from the "Ruthene" parts of Poland-Lithuania plus cossack hosts, and a southern littoral that was Ottoman. Later parts of Western Ukraine became Austrian. There was also a substantial Polish population that Stalin ethnically cleansed - a lot of Wrocław Poles are descended from deportees from Lviv (Lwów)
Have you been to Kyiv? I suspect you might - you’re very well travelled
If you have like me (I went during the war last summer) then you’ll know that Russia’s connection to Kyiv is not imaginary or overdone. There really is a deep intertwining between Kyivan rus and the later Russian nation. Kyiv is the cradle of Russian orthodoxy for starters
This is not true of a city like Lviv and western Ukraine in general - they are much more western, European, Catholic, Teutonic-Slavic
And Odessa only exists because of Russia
It’s hard to find an analogy for the UK re Ukraine but imagine if Scotland went independent taking with it Canterbury, Oxford, Bath and Glastonbury
The English would find that emotionally very difficult
You analogy there is wrong - it would be the equivalent of Scotland going independent and not taking Corby with it. Then using Corby’s history of relocated Scottish steel workers to justify invading England
I have bugger-all expertise on the subject, but since when has that stopped anyone here? so -
Is it just like you wouldn't really blame Germany if they bombed the crap out of Vienna because it's so culturally important to Germans on an emotional level?
I'm guessing either OSA or libel, for those are very easy to breach in this country if you're not careful.. Tbh if/when people are banned a bold note from @PBModerator on the reason for the ban would be handy..
Blanche ran foul of the ban on discussion of grooming, which we've been warned about several dozen times. No idea about felix.
Sandpit will, I hope, be back soon. Ukraine is quite personal for him, so ad homs and/or amateur psychoanalysis are uncalled for.
Yes. Unlike most people here it is very personal for him and for him to be regularly abused for his opinion and one person even called him a Pro-Putin shill, that is really going too far.
As someone else said. We post here for fun. Where's the fun in coming here, putting forward a view, and being attacked on a daily basis for it by the same character ?
That is a misrepresentation of the position. I thoroughly believe he has a strong connection to Ukraine, and wants Ukraine to win.
But he also supports Trump, Musk and the GOP, who have been selling Ukraine down the river for over a year now (e.g. over the many months of delay to the Ukraine aid caused by the GOP, which cost many Ukrainian lives).
And he also watches, promotes, and excuses, channels that are pro-Putin shills. As just one example, his defence of Tim Pool, whose anti-Ukraine views were (ahem) strong, and who it turned out had an 'accidental' Russian paymaster.
I see all of this as utterly contradictory, and it's actually interesting to find out why the apparent contradiction is there. As I've asked him several times: what am I missing in his position?
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
They are in a precarious position all of their own making
I think they have taken a strong position which has had some impact, for which the foundations may be about to be washed away. And they may not know how to reposition, given the support coalition they depend on.
Tentatively, I think Kemi's position may be of a different type, in that she sees 2 or 3 horses, and does not know which one to ride or if she can cover all of them.
If the conflict gets a really great split between Europe - USA (eg NATO split) - then both Reform and Kemi will need to the be on the UK side of the split. I don't think that in this country politicians can throw Ukraine away with contempt; in the US they can.
"Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.
We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine — I mean I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating — and the country’s been blown to smithereens,”
The 4% approval rating is a straight out ridiculous lie.
Every single word is a lie.
Boris Johnson helpfully tells us Trump isn't intending to be "historically accurate" and it's all Europe's fault.
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?
Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.
Putin has compromised by not requiring its return!
Perhaps it was the threat of SKS boots
If you belive Kyiv was the capital of Russia you have drunk the kool aid. Russia is the successor state to Muscovy, I believe Ivan the Terrible was the first to claim to be Tsar of all Russia. Muscovy was a relocation of the Grand Duchy of Vladimir and Suzdal, which was a tributory state of what is now known as Kyivan Rus. It broke up quite quickly into successor states of which Vladimir-Suzdal was originally fairly minor, there were plenty of other including in Ukraine such as Galicia-Volhynia and Chernihiv. At that time "Rus" meant the whole East Slavic people, who later diverged into Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians. Ukraine had quite different genesis from current Russia - it was formed from the "Ruthene" parts of Poland-Lithuania plus cossack hosts, and a southern littoral that was Ottoman. Later parts of Western Ukraine became Austrian. There was also a substantial Polish population that Stalin ethnically cleansed - a lot of Wrocław Poles are descended from deportees from Lviv (Lwów)
Have you been to Kyiv? I suspect you might - you’re very well travelled
If you have like me (I went during the war last summer) then you’ll know that Russia’s connection to Kyiv is not imaginary or overdone. There really is a deep intertwining between Kyivan rus and the later Russian nation. Kyiv is the cradle of Russian orthodoxy for starters
This is not true of a city like Lviv and western Ukraine in general - they are much more western, European, Catholic, Teutonic-Slavic
And Odessa only exists because of Russia
It’s hard to find an analogy for the UK re Ukraine but imagine if Scotland went independent taking with it Canterbury, Oxford, Bath and Glastonbury
The English would find that emotionally very difficult
You analogy there is wrong - it would be the equivalent of Scotland going independent and not taking Corby with it. Then using Corby’s history of relocated Scottish steel workers to justify invading England
There isn't a suitable UK analogy, as the Central European map has been repeatedly redrawn over many centuries, and recently, in ways which just don't exist for us.
Perhaps if NI voted to merge with the Republic, and we decided decades later to invade and conquer the new republic ? But even that doesn't really provide a close analogue.
"Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.
We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine — I mean I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating — and the country’s been blown to smithereens,”
The 4% approval rating is a straight out ridiculous lie.
Every single word is a lie.
Boris Johnson helpfully tells us Trump isn't intending to be "historically accurate" and it's all Europe's fault.
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?
Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
I'd agree with much of that, although I suspect that social media beyond those large news outlets is the main culprit.
Polling suggest Reform voters come from across the political spectrum, the main driver for many appears to be social misinformation. It's no surprise that there's a big correlation between Reform voters and those who believe in conspiracy theories.
I'm guessing either OSA or libel, for those are very easy to breach in this country if you're not careful.. Tbh if/when people are banned a bold note from @PBModerator on the reason for the ban would be handy..
Blanche ran foul of the ban on discussion of grooming, which we've been warned about several dozen times. No idea about felix.
Sandpit will, I hope, be back soon. Ukraine is quite personal for him, so ad homs and/or amateur psychoanalysis are uncalled for.
Yes. Unlike most people here it is very personal for him and for him to be regularly abused for his opinion and one person even called him a Pro-Putin shill, that is really going too far.
As someone else said. We post here for fun. Where's the fun in coming here, putting forward a view, and being attacked on a daily basis for it by the same character ?
That is a misrepresentation of the position. I thoroughly believe he has a strong connection to Ukraine, and wants Ukraine to win.
But he also supports Trump, Musk and the GOP, who have been selling Ukraine down the river for over a year now (e.g. over the many months of delay to the Ukraine aid caused by the GOP, which cost many Ukrainian lives).
And he also watches, promotes, and excuses, channels that are pro-Putin shills. As just one example, his defence of Tim Pool, whose anti-Ukraine views were (ahem) strong, and who it turned out had an 'accidental' Russian paymaster.
I see all of this as utterly contradictory, and it's actually interesting to find out why the apparent contradiction is there. As I've asked him several times: what am I missing in his position?
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
I wonder if there is a possible official representational role for Boris. TBH I think it would be difficult, as it would need a role where competence is not required - a kind of Hangus the Monkey for Hartlepool FC, a mascot.
Putin has compromised by not requiring its return!
Perhaps it was the threat of SKS boots
If you belive Kyiv was the capital of Russia you have drunk the kool aid. Russia is the successor state to Muscovy, I believe Ivan the Terrible was the first to claim to be Tsar of all Russia. Muscovy was a relocation of the Grand Duchy of Vladimir and Suzdal, which was a tributory state of what is now known as Kyivan Rus. It broke up quite quickly into successor states of which Vladimir-Suzdal was originally fairly minor, there were plenty of other including in Ukraine such as Galicia-Volhynia and Chernihiv. At that time "Rus" meant the whole East Slavic people, who later diverged into Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians. Ukraine had quite different genesis from current Russia - it was formed from the "Ruthene" parts of Poland-Lithuania plus cossack hosts, and a southern littoral that was Ottoman. Later parts of Western Ukraine became Austrian. There was also a substantial Polish population that Stalin ethnically cleansed - a lot of Wrocław Poles are descended from deportees from Lviv (Lwów)
Have you been to Kyiv? I suspect you might - you’re very well travelled
If you have like me (I went during the war last summer) then you’ll know that Russia’s connection to Kyiv is not imaginary or overdone. There really is a deep intertwining between Kyivan rus and the later Russian nation. Kyiv is the cradle of Russian orthodoxy for starters
This is not true of a city like Lviv and western Ukraine in general - they are much more western, European, Catholic, Teutonic-Slavic
And Odessa only exists because of Russia
It’s hard to find an analogy for the UK re Ukraine but imagine if Scotland went independent taking with it Canterbury, Oxford, Bath and Glastonbury
The English would find that emotionally very difficult
Yer alright, the symbols of the Church of Pervs, Etonian PMs and Nepos listening to questionable bands are safe.
I'm guessing either OSA or libel, for those are very easy to breach in this country if you're not careful.. Tbh if/when people are banned a bold note from @PBModerator on the reason for the ban would be handy..
Blanche ran foul of the ban on discussion of grooming, which we've been warned about several dozen times. No idea about felix.
Sandpit will, I hope, be back soon. Ukraine is quite personal for him, so ad homs and/or amateur psychoanalysis are uncalled for.
Yes. Unlike most people here it is very personal for him and for him to be regularly abused for his opinion and one person even called him a Pro-Putin shill, that is really going too far.
As someone else said. We post here for fun. Where's the fun in coming here, putting forward a view, and being attacked on a daily basis for it by the same character ?
That is a misrepresentation of the position. I thoroughly believe he has a strong connection to Ukraine, and wants Ukraine to win.
But he also supports Trump, Musk and the GOP, who have been selling Ukraine down the river for over a year now (e.g. over the many months of delay to the Ukraine aid caused by the GOP, which cost many Ukrainian lives).
And he also watches, promotes, and excuses, channels that are pro-Putin shills. As just one example, his defence of Tim Pool, whose anti-Ukraine views were (ahem) strong, and who it turned out had an 'accidental' Russian paymaster.
I see all of this as utterly contradictory, and it's actually interesting to find out why the apparent contradiction is there. As I've asked him several times: what am I missing in his position?
I've had a quick look back, and I think I'm the one who first mentioned TDS in a snarky comment. Sandpit then replied to this, but the blockquotes got mangled and you thought he was the one who brought up TDS.
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
I wonder if there is a possible official representational role for Boris. TBH I think it would be difficult, as it would need a role where competence is not required - a kind of Hangus the Monkey for Hartlepool FC, a mascot.
Have we had one before?
He might be a good ambassador to the US at a time like this.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
Right now, sure. But what about in half a decade's time, when Russia has rebuilt thanks to the benefit of renewed trade with the US, while it spent the time destabilising the rump of Ukraine ? Along with the other former communist vassal states.
This isn't just about what happened in the next year - but whatever does will set the conditions for the next decade. You're basically arguing that Europe can just look away while Ukraine is divided up by Putin and Trump, and go back to the comfortable place it's been in for the last couple of decades. That doesn't seem a realistic plan to me.
Poland itself was one election away from becoming a full on autocracy. Russian plans for it won't be military invasion.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Starmer and Labour have quite a lot to gain, too. And I say that as someone who has been very critical of them.
At the moment it looks bleak for Labour as they’re staring down the barrel of more tax rises and greater defence spending. But if they’re able to land the big stuff, and by that I mean a sensible reshaping of European relations and a controlled approach to immigration, I am starting to wonder if Reform’s shtick will become very old hat fairly quickly. Particularly if the general public blames the US for all this.
That’s not to say they have an easy ride, or that I necessarily expect them to deliver in a competent way, but the path forward is there for them.
Absolutely agree. I think it is obvious that at this moment Starmer and others in the west are waiting to see if it is genuinely the case that free Europe simply has to say 'Very well, alone' WRT USA.
If they don't have to, then a new sort of very unpleasant normal continuing the past will emerge, different but developmental.
If they do, then the last 80 years are ancient history, and basically the language is one of 'war footing' for UK, France, Germany, Poland, Canada etc. With all the consequences for tax, armed forces, nuclear, prosperity, priorities etc; all of which makes Brexit, EU, EFTA, EEA, SM, CU look little local difficulties.
This is were the 'anti-woke' agenda has been heading for some time: not just against woke, but against women, and against anyone who dares to be different.
Thus ensuring you double-down against it, turn up the volume of your hyper-liberalism, further fuelling polarisation and, in your everything or nothing duel, risk losing everything. Including losing liberalism itself.
See where this ends? See how important it is to moderate it?
Of course you don't and won't. Not a bit of it.
How is not automatically blaming the women 'hyper-liberalism' ?
That's what I'm commenting on. The way when anything like this happens, certain people look for any woman to blame. It happens time and time again with incidents. Often followed by some guff about DEI.
Sometimes a woman might be to blame; but it's the automatic "Oh my God it's a woman's fault!" that is indefensible.
It's offensive, wrong, and dickish. But if you seek knobbish views out you will find them.
Which you will because, for you, this is about confirmation bias and finding any reason possible to dismiss the (very real and serious) concerns about Woke and its overreach.
This idiotic guy and you. You both need each other.
I don't usually agree with you Casino, but I'm with you on this. Why quote some random anonymous arsehole on twitter? it's stupid, annoying, counter-productive and just helps promote said random anonymous arsehole.
Because the 'random anonymous arsehole' is very much liked by the algorithm, and often retweeted by Musky Baby himself. The 'random anonymous arsehole' has a massive reach; perhaps more than a modest newspaper.
I'll take your word for it. How many followers do they have?
Of course you linking to the arsehole is helping their reach, so I would say counter-productive. I think most of us are already aware that the algorithm and Musk are promoting a lot of arseholes, if that's your point.
I would find a complaint about Musk retweeting it less stupid, if he did.
EndWokeness has 3.5 million followers. And Musk regularly retweets his stuff.
(incidentally, isn't the fact we still call them 'retweets' another indication of the stupidity of renaming the platform X)
Are they seriously blaming "woman drivers" for the Toronto crash?
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
I wonder if there is a possible official representational role for Boris. TBH I think it would be difficult, as it would need a role where competence is not required - a kind of Hangus the Monkey for Hartlepool FC, a mascot.
Have we had one before?
I hear that’s the current requirement for POTUS. And Boris is US born as well so perfect.
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
I wonder if there is a possible official representational role for Boris. TBH I think it would be difficult, as it would need a role where competence is not required - a kind of Hangus the Monkey for Hartlepool FC, a mascot.
Have we had one before?
I hear that’s the current requirement for POTUS. And Boris is US born as well so perfect.
unfortunately he eventually dropped US citizenship to avoid the tax.
Putin has compromised by not requiring its return!
Perhaps it was the threat of SKS boots
If you belive Kyiv was the capital of Russia you have drunk the kool aid. Russia is the successor state to Muscovy, I believe Ivan the Terrible was the first to claim to be Tsar of all Russia. Muscovy was a relocation of the Grand Duchy of Vladimir and Suzdal, which was a tributory state of what is now known as Kyivan Rus. It broke up quite quickly into successor states of which Vladimir-Suzdal was originally fairly minor, there were plenty of other including in Ukraine such as Galicia-Volhynia and Chernihiv. At that time "Rus" meant the whole East Slavic people, who later diverged into Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians. Ukraine had quite different genesis from current Russia - it was formed from the "Ruthene" parts of Poland-Lithuania plus cossack hosts, and a southern littoral that was Ottoman. Later parts of Western Ukraine became Austrian. There was also a substantial Polish population that Stalin ethnically cleansed - a lot of Wrocław Poles are descended from deportees from Lviv (Lwów)
Have you been to Kyiv? I suspect you might - you’re very well travelled
If you have like me (I went during the war last summer) then you’ll know that Russia’s connection to Kyiv is not imaginary or overdone. There really is a deep intertwining between Kyivan rus and the later Russian nation. Kyiv is the cradle of Russian orthodoxy for starters
This is not true of a city like Lviv and western Ukraine in general - they are much more western, European, Catholic, Teutonic-Slavic
And Odessa only exists because of Russia
It’s hard to find an analogy for the UK re Ukraine but imagine if Scotland went independent taking with it Canterbury, Oxford, Bath and Glastonbury
The English would find that emotionally very difficult
Sounds awesome to me as an Oxford resident. I've never quite understood people's emotional attachment to being in the same country as Great Yarmouth, Barnsley and Wisbech.
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
I wonder if there is a possible official representational role for Boris. TBH I think it would be difficult, as it would need a role where competence is not required - a kind of Hangus the Monkey for Hartlepool FC, a mascot.
Have we had one before?
I hear that’s the current requirement for POTUS. And Boris is US born as well so perfect.
But he renounced his US citizenship and there’s also a long residency requirement, isn’t there?
Oh, and Trump isn’t trying to unilaterally re-interpret the US constitution in such a way as to undo Johnson’s US citizenship claim. Under Trump’s interpretation, Johnson was never a US citizen.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
Right now, sure. But what about in half a decade's time, when Russia has rebuilt thanks to the benefit of renewed trade with the US, while it spent the time destabilising the rump of Ukraine ? Along with the other former communist vassal states.
This isn't just about what happened in the next year - but whatever does will set the conditions for the next decade. You're basically arguing that Europe can just look away while Ukraine is divided up by Putin and Trump, and go back to the comfortable place it's been in for the last couple of decades. That doesn't seem a realistic plan to me.
It seems like a very realistic plan to me because it's probably what will happen. Beyond the Ultras there are very few votes is raising taxes or cutting services to spend money, 90% of which will be wasted, on military capability to counter some hypothetical Russian war machine which may eventuate 10 years hence.
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
I wonder if there is a possible official representational role for Boris. TBH I think it would be difficult, as it would need a role where competence is not required - a kind of Hangus the Monkey for Hartlepool FC, a mascot.
Have we had one before?
He might be a good ambassador to the US at a time like this.
In my head canon fantasy government league, there is a Ministry for the Intermarium and he's the minister. If we can get his current wife or mistress to stamp on his balls and make him behave like a grown up, it would work. Still, it's only a fantasy...
Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.
For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.
Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.
It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.
Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,
Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question
The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.
The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
Putin has compromised by not requiring its return!
Perhaps it was the threat of SKS boots
If you belive Kyiv was the capital of Russia you have drunk the kool aid. Russia is the successor state to Muscovy, I believe Ivan the Terrible was the first to claim to be Tsar of all Russia. Muscovy was a relocation of the Grand Duchy of Vladimir and Suzdal, which was a tributory state of what is now known as Kyivan Rus. It broke up quite quickly into successor states of which Vladimir-Suzdal was originally fairly minor, there were plenty of other including in Ukraine such as Galicia-Volhynia and Chernihiv. At that time "Rus" meant the whole East Slavic people, who later diverged into Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians. Ukraine had quite different genesis from current Russia - it was formed from the "Ruthene" parts of Poland-Lithuania plus cossack hosts, and a southern littoral that was Ottoman. Later parts of Western Ukraine became Austrian. There was also a substantial Polish population that Stalin ethnically cleansed - a lot of Wrocław Poles are descended from deportees from Lviv (Lwów)
Have you been to Kyiv? I suspect you might - you’re very well travelled
If you have like me (I went during the war last summer) then you’ll know that Russia’s connection to Kyiv is not imaginary or overdone. There really is a deep intertwining between Kyivan rus and the later Russian nation. Kyiv is the cradle of Russian orthodoxy for starters
This is not true of a city like Lviv and western Ukraine in general - they are much more western, European, Catholic, Teutonic-Slavic
And Odessa only exists because of Russia
It’s hard to find an analogy for the UK re Ukraine but imagine if Scotland went independent taking with it Canterbury, Oxford, Bath and Glastonbury
The English would find that emotionally very difficult
You analogy there is wrong - it would be the equivalent of Scotland going independent and not taking Corby with it. Then using Corby’s history of relocated Scottish steel workers to justify invading England
I have bugger-all expertise on the subject, but since when has that stopped anyone here? so -
Is it just like you wouldn't really blame Germany if they bombed the crap out of Vienna because it's so culturally important to Germans on an emotional level?
Large chunks of the world are historically and emotionally British.
Legally, all of France is, as well.
I demand the 13 colonies be returned to me, personally.
I'm pretty much with Rochdale on this. Even without the malevolence, Trump is headed right back to a series of golden ages that mainly exist in his head, such as to the oil era economically via "Drill Baby Drill", and cannot be recreated now.
But his grass roots supporters won't get off the helter-skelter until they crash because they have fallen for the stuff themselves. I mark the oligarch supporters down as operating in their self-interest with a few variations.
In the process he is burning down most of the things the USA actually needs to move forward, internally and externally, at incalculable cost for the USA and the rest of the world.
The main beneficiary of all this craziness won't even be Russia but China, who are getting a good few decades worth of growth, power, influence, might handed to them on a plate by Trump.
We should hitch our wagon to China . I mean given the US is run by a morally bankrupt corrupt administration we shouldn’t get too moral now.
For all its faults, the US is not exterminating Uighurs. However it is withdrawing childhood vaccination, so the death toll should be comparable...
Reform UK voters are much more likely to have a positive view of Donald Trump than other voters, slightly more likely to have a positive view of Vladimir Putin, and less likely to have a positive view of Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Donald Trump - net favourability scores Lib Dem: -84 Labour: -82 Conservative: -40 Reform UK: +38
Thanks, HYUFD. This repeats what we have seen in other polling: the split is between Reform UK supporters and everyone else. It suggests that Badenoch should not be trying to out-Reform Reform, but should instead be emphasising the differences.
The next question is: why? Why are Reform UK supporters so different in their views? Do they just have different views about how to solve the problems in the world? And/or do they have different goals? Or are they victims of mass disinformation?
I think Reform UK supporters are perhaps (even?) more siloed than the rest. Others' views may differ - I'd be interested to hear.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
Worth keeping an eye on whether Boris is reflecting on whether the chance of a Churchill moment could still come. It is hard to imagine anyone else being a sort of universal solvent and glue to unstitch Reform voters from extreme Trumpism, bind them to a pro western Toryism and shore up at least some of the old Tory vote.
I wonder if there is a possible official representational role for Boris. TBH I think it would be difficult, as it would need a role where competence is not required - a kind of Hangus the Monkey for Hartlepool FC, a mascot.
Have we had one before?
We don't live in an age in which political magnanimity is much to the fore. Proper crises tend to produce a different sort of polity, but Boris ultimately failed at the last crisis. Maybe he is closer to the Hartlepool monkey than Gladstone or Churchill. But I still have a sense that rightly deployed he could be a unique weapon. Others in the box of a different sort would include Brown, Blair (!), Robertson and Cameron.
Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.
For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.
Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.
It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.
Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,
Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question
The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.
The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
It’s not the bearings as such. They reused the training gear racks. Think a huge circle of metal with a precise gear pattern on it. A gear attached to a train motor engages with that.
In the ship it was set horizontally to control direction of the turret. Very precisely and preventing any movement from the set direction.
IIRC at Jodrell Bank, they are used to control elevation and are vertical.
Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
I had to look up what it means, which itself proves I am one.
"Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.
We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine — I mean I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating — and the country’s been blown to smithereens,”
The 4% approval rating is a straight out ridiculous lie.
Every single word is a lie.
Boris Johnson helpfully tells us Trump isn't intending to be "historically accurate" and it's all Europe's fault.
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?
Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.
What a weird volte face from Johnson. Presumably this is all because he is daydreaming of leading a combined Tory-Reform force.
Very slightly tragic for Johnson in my view. He knows his legacy rests on COVID vaccines and early support for Ukraine, neither of which are rated by the Trumpist faction he's thrown his lot in with.
He could have said, Trump is a great friend whom I have a lot of respect for, but I disagree with him on Ukraine. But he couldn't bring himself to do that and in this way trashes what's left of his reputation. And I think he knows it.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
I do hope we have one of those pro-Putin LDs on here. Would be fascinating to examine in more detail. Maybe one of our Saturday visitors?
Zelenskyy is illegitimate due to his poor record on potholes and insufficient PR?
He's done little for active travel and his approach to cycle paths leaves a lot to be desired.
His approach to psychopaths is first-rate, however.
I'm pretty much with Rochdale on this. Even without the malevolence, Trump is headed right back to a series of golden ages that mainly exist in his head, such as to the oil era economically via "Drill Baby Drill", and cannot be recreated now.
But his grass roots supporters won't get off the helter-skelter until they crash because they have fallen for the stuff themselves. I mark the oligarch supporters down as operating in their self-interest with a few variations.
In the process he is burning down most of the things the USA actually needs to move forward, internally and externally, at incalculable cost for the USA and the rest of the world.
The main beneficiary of all this craziness won't even be Russia but China, who are getting a good few decades worth of growth, power, influence, might handed to them on a plate by Trump.
We should hitch our wagon to China . I mean given the US is run by a morally bankrupt corrupt administration we shouldn’t get too moral now.
For all its faults, the US is not exterminating Uighurs. However it is withdrawing childhood vaccination, so the death toll should be comparable...
Time for some meaningful subsidies to big pharma to build vaccines plants and R&D centres here.
More broadly it’s worth government scouting around to see if it can attract any newly footloose “international woke capital”. Even if 95% of the tech industry is happily jumping into bed with Trump and Musk, that 5% is a decent number.
Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
"Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.
We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine — I mean I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating — and the country’s been blown to smithereens,”
The 4% approval rating is a straight out ridiculous lie.
Every single word is a lie.
Boris Johnson helpfully tells us Trump isn't intending to be "historically accurate" and it's all Europe's fault.
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?
Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.
What a weird volte face from Johnson. Presumably this is all because he is daydreaming of leading a combined Tory-Reform force.
Very slightly tragic for Johnson in my view. He knows his legacy rests on COVID vaccines and early support for Ukraine, neither of which are rated by the Trumpist faction he's thrown his lot in with.
He could have said, Trump is a great friend whom I have a lot of respect for, but I disagree with him on Ukraine. But he couldn't bring himself to do that and in this way trashes what's left of his reputation. And I think he knows it.
Johnson couldn’t give a fig for his “reputation”. However, the regular Daily Mail income demands that he attempts some kind of coherency in his public offerings.
I'm pretty much with Rochdale on this. Even without the malevolence, Trump is headed right back to a series of golden ages that mainly exist in his head, such as to the oil era economically via "Drill Baby Drill", and cannot be recreated now.
But his grass roots supporters won't get off the helter-skelter until they crash because they have fallen for the stuff themselves. I mark the oligarch supporters down as operating in their self-interest with a few variations.
In the process he is burning down most of the things the USA actually needs to move forward, internally and externally, at incalculable cost for the USA and the rest of the world.
The main beneficiary of all this craziness won't even be Russia but China, who are getting a good few decades worth of growth, power, influence, might handed to them on a plate by Trump.
We should hitch our wagon to China . I mean given the US is run by a morally bankrupt corrupt administration we shouldn’t get too moral now.
For all its faults, the US is not exterminating Uighurs. However it is withdrawing childhood vaccination, so the death toll should be comparable...
Time for some meaningful subsidies to big pharma to build vaccines plants and R&D centres here.
More broadly it’s worth government scouting around to see if it can attract any newly footloose “international woke capital”. Even if 95% of the tech industry is happily jumping into bed with Trump and Musk, that 5% is a decent number.
I think many, many Americans will be considering options before too long.
Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
Trump has said multiple even more despicable things before now (e.g., proposing invading Greenland, supporting the ethnic cleansing in Gaza), but I think people ignored those as they seemed more like rhetoric than action. With Ukraine, the reality seems closer.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
It seems to have evolved into a term used by extremists in general to refer to everyone who isn't. So not exactly devastating as an insult.
Wow. This looks like absolutely amazing work analyzing the British and German railways by the FT. > "German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways" https://x.com/thomasforth/status/1892178693688017016
That overall judgment is correct, but: Line up your British operators as the FT have done and all the North British ones (except Merseyrail and Scotrail, because separated and/or devolved) are as bad or much worse than German railways. And the top performers are overwhelmingly in the South.
I know almost for certain that this delusion penetrated deeply within DfT and led to substantial cancellations of Northern investment. It was easy for people in London to look at averages pushed up by the hugely upgraded and brand new lines into London, sit back, and relax...
Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
“Give me Greenland or I’ll impose tariffs”?
So far Trump emissaries haven’t flown to Copenhagen with an actually drawn up treaty with specific terms granting privileged access to economic wealth in perpetuity.
For example, the FDP : According to their ideas, a low earner with an annual income of 20,000 euros would have their tax burden reduced by 201 euros, which corresponds to around one percent. A high earner with a gross annual income of 120,000 euros would be better off by a whopping 7,715 euros, or 6.4 percent. According to the FDP plans, a single person with an average income of 40,000 euros would have their tax burden reduced by 1,507 euros, or 3.8 percent.
The plans of the AfD, which often portray themselves as the party of the disadvantaged and low earners, also mean that higher earners benefit more than those on low incomes - in some cases the effect is even stronger than with the FDP. According to the AfD's plans, a married couple with two children and a low annual gross income of 40,000 euros can expect a relief of 984 euros (2.5 percent of gross annual income). If the same family earned 180,000 euros, the relief would be a whopping 12,145 euros (6.7 percent of gross annual income).
The SPD and the Left Party , on the other hand, want to make high earners pay more in order to relieve the burden on small and medium incomes. The SPD wants 95 percent of the population to benefit from this relief, while the top earners, i.e. the top five percent of earners, should be taxed more heavily. The Left Party wants incomes of up to 16,800 euros per year to remain tax-free, but the party wants to tax top earners of over one million euros at up to 75 percent.
According to IW calculations, the FDP and AfD proposals are by far the most expensive. The additional burden on the state budget would amount to 104 and 100 billion euros respectively - and this despite the fact that the plans largely benefit top earners: In the AfD 's case, almost 41 percent of the costs (40.9 billion euros) are spent on easing the burden on the highest income decile, i.e. the top ten percent of households. Singles with a gross annual income of over 82,250 euros can be included in this group. The relief for the top one percent, i.e. the absolute top earners (from 179,140 euros gross annual income), would still amount to an impressive 16.5 billion euros or a good 16 percent of the total costs under the AfD proposal.
The SPD 's plan would result in additional costs of five billion euros. This would make it the most economical proposal.
Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
It does, however, present the possibility of Europe (if it can get its act together) presenting Ukraine with a better deal. Which might benefit both them and us.
Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
How is it going down Stateside?
Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
"Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.
We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine — I mean I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating — and the country’s been blown to smithereens,”
The 4% approval rating is a straight out ridiculous lie.
Every single word is a lie.
Boris Johnson helpfully tells us Trump isn't intending to be "historically accurate" and it's all Europe's fault.
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?
Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.
What a weird volte face from Johnson. Presumably this is all because he is daydreaming of leading a combined Tory-Reform force.
Very slightly tragic for Johnson in my view. He knows his legacy rests on COVID vaccines and early support for Ukraine, neither of which are rated by the Trumpist faction he's thrown his lot in with.
He could have said, Trump is a great friend whom I have a lot of respect for, but I disagree with him on Ukraine. But he couldn't bring himself to do that and in this way trashes what's left of his reputation. And I think he knows it.
Johnson has always been a rather tawdry figure but this is a new low, even for him.
I'm pretty much with Rochdale on this. Even without the malevolence, Trump is headed right back to a series of golden ages that mainly exist in his head, such as to the oil era economically via "Drill Baby Drill", and cannot be recreated now.
But his grass roots supporters won't get off the helter-skelter until they crash because they have fallen for the stuff themselves. I mark the oligarch supporters down as operating in their self-interest with a few variations.
In the process he is burning down most of the things the USA actually needs to move forward, internally and externally, at incalculable cost for the USA and the rest of the world.
The main beneficiary of all this craziness won't even be Russia but China, who are getting a good few decades worth of growth, power, influence, might handed to them on a plate by Trump.
We should hitch our wagon to China . I mean given the US is run by a morally bankrupt corrupt administration we shouldn’t get too moral now.
For all its faults, the US is not exterminating Uighurs. However it is withdrawing childhood vaccination, so the death toll should be comparable...
Time for some meaningful subsidies to big pharma to build vaccines plants and R&D centres here.
More broadly it’s worth government scouting around to see if it can attract any newly footloose “international woke capital”. Even if 95% of the tech industry is happily jumping into bed with Trump and Musk, that 5% is a decent number.
I think many, many Americans will be considering options before too long.
I hope so. That's the ultimate backstop protection against the evil and idiocy of Trump. America itself. America and Americans. Ok so they shat the bed on Nov 5th but there's no reason for that to define them forever. They can wake up, wise up, and detox.
"Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it — three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.
We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine — I mean I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating — and the country’s been blown to smithereens,”
The 4% approval rating is a straight out ridiculous lie.
Every single word is a lie.
Boris Johnson helpfully tells us Trump isn't intending to be "historically accurate" and it's all Europe's fault.
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?
Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.
What a weird volte face from Johnson. Presumably this is all because he is daydreaming of leading a combined Tory-Reform force.
Very slightly tragic for Johnson in my view. He knows his legacy rests on COVID vaccines and early support for Ukraine, neither of which are rated by the Trumpist faction he's thrown his lot in with.
He could have said, Trump is a great friend whom I have a lot of respect for, but I disagree with him on Ukraine. But he couldn't bring himself to do that and in this way trashes what's left of his reputation. And I think he knows it.
Johnson couldn’t give a fig for his “reputation”. However, the regular Daily Mail income demands that he attempts some kind of coherency in his public offerings.
I think Boris Johnson is absolutely serious about him being the man who saved Ukraine and his weird justification of Donald Trump's remarks are his final attempt to hang on to that perceived achievement before entirely rejecting everything he pretended to stand for previously.
Wow. This looks like absolutely amazing work analyzing the British and German railways by the FT. > "German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways" https://x.com/thomasforth/status/1892178693688017016
That overall judgment is correct, but: Line up your British operators as the FT have done and all the North British ones (except Merseyrail and Scotrail, because separated and/or devolved) are as bad or much worse than German railways. And the top performers are overwhelmingly in the South.
I know almost for certain that this delusion penetrated deeply within DfT and led to substantial cancellations of Northern investment. It was easy for people in London to look at averages pushed up by the hugely upgraded and brand new lines into London, sit back, and relax...
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.
I certainly hope he doesn't leave here either. We give it to each other with both barrels here at times (myself very much included) but nobody should be shamed for expressing an opinion, which is what some have attempted to do.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
I am pretty thick skinned, centrist and a dad, so completely unbuttered by what @Leon says.
I simply ignore him as far as is possible, like any other troll.
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
It's proven quite a durable and evocative pejorative so there must be something in it. It fairly accurately bespeaks a certain stripe of hideously white middle class Englishman who never strays too far from the Monty Python - Pratchett - Blackadder axis of cultural references and listens to fucking podcasts.
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.
If I was scanning a thread to catch up Sandpit was one of the names I would look out for to read. Not that I've done that for a while.
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.
Aka right of centrist dad?
Exactly. Even got a slightly battered Jag to prove it!
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
I am pretty thick skinned, centrist and a dad, so completely unbuttered by what @Leon says.
I simply ignore him as far as is possible, like any other troll.
Funny how no one is jumping to your defence though. It's only when the precious Trumpists get a bit of stick that we get all the pearl-clutching.
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.
Hard to disagree with a word of that, from beginning to end.
TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"
Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?
Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.
I'm guessing either OSA or libel, for those are very easy to breach in this country if you're not careful.. Tbh if/when people are banned a bold note from @PBModerator on the reason for the ban would be handy..
Blanche ran foul of the ban on discussion of grooming, which we've been warned about several dozen times. No idea about felix.
Sandpit will, I hope, be back soon. Ukraine is quite personal for him, so ad homs and/or amateur psychoanalysis are uncalled for.
Must be the only Trump loving Ukraine supporter left in the world, can be lonely up there at the top.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
It's proven quite a durable and evocative pejorative so there must be something in it. It fairly accurately bespeaks a certain stripe of hideously white middle class Englishman who never strays too far from the Monty Python - Pratchett - Blackadder axis of cultural references and listens to fucking podcasts.
Oh it's definitely a thing. Add a bit of cycling, IPAs, flat whites. A guilty love of old Top Gear.
The problem is that the Millennial centrist dad is about to become the most important part of the electorate.
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.
Well said. I'm happy to bore everyone on this site as well.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Starmer and Labour have quite a lot to gain, too. And I say that as someone who has been very critical of them.
At the moment it looks bleak for Labour as they’re staring down the barrel of more tax rises and greater defence spending. But if they’re able to land the big stuff, and by that I mean a sensible reshaping of European relations and a controlled approach to immigration, I am starting to wonder if Reform’s shtick will become very old hat fairly quickly. Particularly if the general public blames the US for all this.
That’s not to say they have an easy ride, or that I necessarily expect them to deliver in a competent way, but the path forward is there for them.
Absolutely. Labour have a chance to deliver controlled immigration and strong defence, where the Tories failed and Reform wouldn't be able to.
You wankers are going to turn PB into fucking Bluesky
Having looked at this mornings posts I can see why @Sandpit left - @JosiasJessop was being an annoying prat on a topic Sandpit cares about
A nonsense take. Sorry.
The question was why Sandpit left - how does saying what I think happened is a nonsense take.
People don’t need to post here - we do it for fun and if it doesn’t become fun people can easily disappear.
Because I think your take on the exchange in question ("caring Sandpit chased away by annoying prat JosiasJessop") is absurd.
I'd be interested to see you try and justify it. Perhaps you saw something there that I missed.
@JosiasJessop did push it when @Sandpit didn't wanted to engage. But he wasn’t impolite or unreasonable. I suspect @Sandpit is feeling bad about it but isn’t ready to admit it yet
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
It's proven quite a durable and evocative pejorative so there must be something in it. It fairly accurately bespeaks a certain stripe of hideously white middle class Englishman who never strays too far from the Monty Python - Pratchett - Blackadder axis of cultural references and listens to fucking podcasts.
how is it pejorative? and what about "centrist mum?"
it's surely less embarrassing to be a centrist parent/guardian than a parent/guardian who tries to be edgy by swearing on the internet?
I'm pretty much with Rochdale on this. Even without the malevolence, Trump is headed right back to a series of golden ages that mainly exist in his head, such as to the oil era economically via "Drill Baby Drill", and cannot be recreated now.
But his grass roots supporters won't get off the helter-skelter until they crash because they have fallen for the stuff themselves. I mark the oligarch supporters down as operating in their self-interest with a few variations.
In the process he is burning down most of the things the USA actually needs to move forward, internally and externally, at incalculable cost for the USA and the rest of the world.
The main beneficiary of all this craziness won't even be Russia but China, who are getting a good few decades worth of growth, power, influence, might handed to them on a plate by Trump.
We should hitch our wagon to China . I mean given the US is run by a morally bankrupt corrupt administration we shouldn’t get too moral now.
For all its faults, the US is not exterminating Uighurs. However it is withdrawing childhood vaccination, so the death toll should be comparable...
Time for some meaningful subsidies to big pharma to build vaccines plants and R&D centres here.
More broadly it’s worth government scouting around to see if it can attract any newly footloose “international woke capital”. Even if 95% of the tech industry is happily jumping into bed with Trump and Musk, that 5% is a decent number.
I think many, many Americans will be considering options before too long.
I hope so. That's the ultimate backstop protection against the evil and idiocy of Trump. America itself. America and Americans. Ok so they shat the bed on Nov 5th but there's no reason for that to define them forever. They can wake up, wise up, and detox.
I think America can move away from Trumpism, but I am not convinced it is coming back to the aid or support of Europe any time soon. The direction of travel was always away from the European continent. It is now accelerating precipitously under Trump. It is hard to see anything other than that continuing, even under a new administration. When the ties are severed, it is hard to build them back.
We simply cannot rely on America anymore and we need to find our own solutions.
NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”
Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.
Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?
Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine
That's literally what they tried to do (checks notes) less than 3 years ago.
Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
How is it going down Stateside?
Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.
I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
I don't think this war ends this year judging by how it's going and the massive arms shipments domestically and internationally being sent to either side.
I'm pretty much with Rochdale on this. Even without the malevolence, Trump is headed right back to a series of golden ages that mainly exist in his head, such as to the oil era economically via "Drill Baby Drill", and cannot be recreated now.
But his grass roots supporters won't get off the helter-skelter until they crash because they have fallen for the stuff themselves. I mark the oligarch supporters down as operating in their self-interest with a few variations.
In the process he is burning down most of the things the USA actually needs to move forward, internally and externally, at incalculable cost for the USA and the rest of the world.
The main beneficiary of all this craziness won't even be Russia but China, who are getting a good few decades worth of growth, power, influence, might handed to them on a plate by Trump.
We should hitch our wagon to China . I mean given the US is run by a morally bankrupt corrupt administration we shouldn’t get too moral now.
For all its faults, the US is not exterminating Uighurs. However it is withdrawing childhood vaccination, so the death toll should be comparable...
Time for some meaningful subsidies to big pharma to build vaccines plants and R&D centres here.
More broadly it’s worth government scouting around to see if it can attract any newly footloose “international woke capital”. Even if 95% of the tech industry is happily jumping into bed with Trump and Musk, that 5% is a decent number.
I think many, many Americans will be considering options before too long.
I hope so. That's the ultimate backstop protection against the evil and idiocy of Trump. America itself. America and Americans. Ok so they shat the bed on Nov 5th but there's no reason for that to define them forever. They can wake up, wise up, and detox.
TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"
Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?
Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.
I bet you never thought you'd end up the front line of the culture war for reviewing electric cars.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
It's proven quite a durable and evocative pejorative so there must be something in it. It fairly accurately bespeaks a certain stripe of hideously white middle class Englishman who never strays too far from the Monty Python - Pratchett - Blackadder axis of cultural references and listens to fucking podcasts.
Oh it's definitely a thing. Add a bit of cycling, IPAs, flat whites. A guilty love of old Top Gear.
The problem is that the Millennial centrist dad is about to become the most important part of the electorate.
I believe they are easily identifiable by the fact they all wear those appalling blue/brown/black non-sports trainers with the thick white soles. And a gilet.
TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"
Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?
Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.
Must be terrible if you actually drive one of those nazimobiles these days.
Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.
bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.
Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
@Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
It's not even accurate.
It really means Social Democrat Dad, which isn't centrist.
You wankers are going to turn PB into fucking Bluesky
Having looked at this mornings posts I can see why @Sandpit left - @JosiasJessop was being an annoying prat on a topic Sandpit cares about
A nonsense take. Sorry.
The question was why Sandpit left - how does saying what I think happened is a nonsense take.
People don’t need to post here - we do it for fun and if it doesn’t become fun people can easily disappear.
Because I think your take on the exchange in question ("caring Sandpit chased away by annoying prat JosiasJessop") is absurd.
I'd be interested to see you try and justify it. Perhaps you saw something there that I missed.
@JosiasJessop did push it when @Sandpit didn't wanted to engage. But he wasn’t impolite or unreasonable. I suspect @Sandpit is feeling bad about it but isn’t ready to admit it yet
He is a big cry baby, Josias is allowed to post as often as he wants, and could just have just dropped it instead of flouncing off with his tail between his legs. Needs to act his age and not his shoe size. Josias has had plenty of garbage spouted at him but has taken it and replied , if you have such an inferiority complex then you should stay away from posting on social media where you are guaranteed brickbats regardless of opinion.
I'm pretty much with Rochdale on this. Even without the malevolence, Trump is headed right back to a series of golden ages that mainly exist in his head, such as to the oil era economically via "Drill Baby Drill", and cannot be recreated now.
But his grass roots supporters won't get off the helter-skelter until they crash because they have fallen for the stuff themselves. I mark the oligarch supporters down as operating in their self-interest with a few variations.
In the process he is burning down most of the things the USA actually needs to move forward, internally and externally, at incalculable cost for the USA and the rest of the world.
The main beneficiary of all this craziness won't even be Russia but China, who are getting a good few decades worth of growth, power, influence, might handed to them on a plate by Trump.
We should hitch our wagon to China . I mean given the US is run by a morally bankrupt corrupt administration we shouldn’t get too moral now.
For all its faults, the US is not exterminating Uighurs. However it is withdrawing childhood vaccination, so the death toll should be comparable...
Time for some meaningful subsidies to big pharma to build vaccines plants and R&D centres here.
More broadly it’s worth government scouting around to see if it can attract any newly footloose “international woke capital”. Even if 95% of the tech industry is happily jumping into bed with Trump and Musk, that 5% is a decent number.
I think many, many Americans will be considering options before too long.
I hope so. That's the ultimate backstop protection against the evil and idiocy of Trump. America itself. America and Americans. Ok so they shat the bed on Nov 5th but there's no reason for that to define them forever. They can wake up, wise up, and detox.
It is self evident that the Business Secretary has committed a criminal offence by describing himself as a "Solicitor" when non-articled trainee clerk would have been the correct designation. That is straight forward.
However, as a member of the legal profession surely there is also a duty on Starmer to ensure those who work with him are properly described, in the same way as a doctor has a duty to report fellow "doctors" if it transpires they might not have elementary competence. Particularly now it has come to light is Starmer not in real jepardy if he does not remove the whip from Reynolds with all convenient haste ?
FPT
In true PB tradition this isn’t technically correct. A trainee solicitor can legitimately call themselves a “trainee solicitor”. I don’t know what this chap referred to himself as but “an articled clerk” hasn’t been a thing in England and Wales for over 30 years.
Section 21 of the Solicitors Act 1974 states:
“Any unqualified person who wilfully pretends to be, or takes or uses any name, title, addition or description implying that he is, qualified or recognised by law as qualified to act as a solicitor shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding the fourth level on the standard scale.”
He told the Commons that he worked as a solicitor in Manchester before changing career.
Apparently there are also misleading linked in snaps on Guido but I haven’t checked that website.
Surely the offence is to practise as a solicitor when you are not qualified to be one, not to leave out the word "trainee" on a CV for a non-legal job.
It would be interesting to get a representative sample of CVs from a range of senior people and see how many have been embellished in some way, I would suspect all of them.
I assumed though but @Gallowgate ’s quote from the act suggests not.
In my view he’s broken the law (strict liability) and the punishment should be a conditional discharge.
I wish these lazy websites/journalists would actually quote or screenshot the website referenced rather than just “alleged” or “reported”.
https://www.jonathanreynolds.org.uk/about-me/ This bit seems acceptable - he did accept a training contract to be a solicitor and that isn’t in contravention of any laws as far as I understand them.
Looking at the same website on archive.org that quote hasn’t changed in 5 years.
Unless I am missing something, or it’s a different website or part of the website, this may be fake news.
To clarify, if the alleged issue is with the following, then he has done nothing wrong in my view.
“In 2007 I was finally able to enrol in law school, now as a mature student, and went on to achieve my Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and Legal Practice Course (LPC) at BPP Law School in Manchester. I was delighted to be offered a training contract to become a solicitor with Addleshaw Goddard LLP in Manchester. Addleshaw was a fantastic place to work.”
This is all very normal terminology within the legal industry. I guess he doesn’t make it entirely clear he didn’t complete his training contract but I doubt it is that deep. To suggest this is some sort of fraudulent “gotcha”? Talk about focusing on the big issues.
I’ve provided a link where he says he “worked as a solicitor” at AG.
It’s not big stuff, of course. Guido’s a muck-raker and scandal-monkey. But it is an offence with strict liability. I guess lawyers don’t like people pretending to be lawyers. Competition or something.
Aye @Foss already provided that link. My bad for missing it.
I’m at a loss as to the issue that pay says “ training contract to become a solicitor” which to me is very, very clear cut - your complaint appears to be if I ignore the “training contract to become” bit he’s claiming to be a solicitor
Linkedin, his own website - it's just weird, a fantasist that seems to have started to believe it himself.
Angels dancing on the head of a pin. My last solicitor was a trainee (under supervision). Was she "acting as a solicitor"? Probably. Would she have described herself as a solicitor? I don't know but have just noticed I already did.
Embarrassing perhaps but only fatal if Starmer is already looking to move Reynolds out, or unless there is a link to an actual scandal like ballsing up a contract.
If she's doing the work of a solicitor, charging for oine, and being responsible (together with her employer) for the results, then ...
A lot of jobs have a lengthy training period and one doesn't get full professional qualifications for several years. Often with various grades thereof. One thinks of doctors.
Medical doctors get to call themselves that after medical school despite the fact they have considerable further training ahead of them. Foundation year doctors can only work under supervision. I am not familiar with solicitors, but this seems to be a difference. Doctors can call themselves doctors sooner than solicitors can call themselves solicitors.
What are you referring to?
Anybody can call themselves a doctor. Unfortunately it's not a protected term. There are many thousands of wallies who have never come anywhere near getting a doctorate [*] who call themselves "doctors". Unfortunately far from causing them to be held in contempt (or thrown in jail), their pretensions win them fawning respect among the uneducated herd.
* A qualification that is not based on "training" but requires a person to have made a substantial contribution to knowledge.
'Anyone' can famously include a dead cat. At least the one owned by Ben Goldacre the anti-woowoo campaigner. The ex-moggy has a PhD in the sort of nutrition one sees on the telly. Signed diploma and all.
TBF getting a PhD does imply training on the job - that's what the supervisor and the student do - but the actual qualification does demand the contribution to knowledge. However, that's UK specific. (Some Usonian PhDs do include a course work element, effectively therefore partly a MSc (etc) by study.)
Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.
For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.
Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.
It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.
Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,
Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question
The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.
The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.
In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.
In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.
That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.
Hard to disagree with a word of that, from beginning to end.
I fail to see it being excessively personal or aggressive, just the cut and thrust of debate. If you cannot take the heat then stay out of the kitchen.
Comments
At the moment it looks bleak for Labour as they’re staring down the barrel of more tax rises and greater defence spending. But if they’re able to land the big stuff, and by that I mean a sensible reshaping of European relations and a controlled approach to immigration, I am starting to wonder if Reform’s shtick will become very old hat fairly quickly. Particularly if the general public blames the US for all this.
That’s not to say they have an easy ride, or that I necessarily expect them to deliver in a competent way, but the path forward is there for them.
Channels such as GBN, maybe Talk TV (but I can't comment as I don't track it), tabloids (including much of the Telegraph) feed misinformation into their "news" output.
Alongside that there is also a type of supporter / voter who feel victimised and ignored and have disengaged, but re-engaged with Reform quite passively - I know some who vote Lee Anderson. They feel there is no alternative, because all the other options have failed. Keeping these corralled is imo one reason for the "Uniparty" type rhetoric.
The propaganda from Reform, but also from parts of the wider Right, is all about very personalised demonisation of Starmer and largely false fears about our society, which is where Musk tries to get leverage. And it gets it's response on social media.
And there is a bleed in of much harder politics than we have here from the Usonian (!) Right, plus the hard right (choose your word) faction who are in Reform, or are Militant-in-Labour pattern entryists.
AFAICS Reform are the only UK *party* (with MPs) still genuflecting to Trump (I may have missed a couple of independents). We need to see how much it unwinds if we get genuine national peril coming closer.
There are numbers of RefUk supporters who I think will wake up without admitting they ever got anything wrong, some who are too far in to back out easily and may maintain their dogma or just pipe down, and others who will run away to hide with their money for the duration. All of these happened as WW2 built up.
There will also be a changed dynamic as, and to the extent which, the Starmer Govt policies succeed.
You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?
This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/judgment-day-the-case-for-leaving-the-echr/
England v. Australia.
Germans ‘must bite the bullet and bring back conscription’
Boris Pistorius, the defence minister, calls for a huge boost to troop numbers and defence spending to avert a Russian attack on Nato
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/german-defence-minister-conscription-defence-spending-ukraine-2fckmdxpt
They gave them up and now they are being betrayed.
Still find it an unpleasant drink though. And I'm the prime market for unfashionable and old-fashioned beer. I'm generally positive about stouts and porters and the like. But not mild. Mildly unpalatable.
As someone else said. We post here for fun. Where's the fun in coming here, putting forward a view, and being attacked on a daily basis for it by the same character ?
The government's position has to be a bit ambiguous, rightly, because they are the government and have to act without, if possible, finding itself blocked off in a cul de sac. FWIW I think so far the government, with a lousy hand, have been OK. Early days however.
https://news.sky.com/story/widespread-ageism-against-wealth-hoarding-boomers-must-be-addressed-mps-say-13311403
Is it just like you wouldn't really blame Germany if they bombed the crap out of Vienna because it's so culturally important to Germans on an emotional level?
But he also supports Trump, Musk and the GOP, who have been selling Ukraine down the river for over a year now (e.g. over the many months of delay to the Ukraine aid caused by the GOP, which cost many Ukrainian lives).
And he also watches, promotes, and excuses, channels that are pro-Putin shills. As just one example, his defence of Tim Pool, whose anti-Ukraine views were (ahem) strong, and who it turned out had an 'accidental' Russian paymaster.
I see all of this as utterly contradictory, and it's actually interesting to find out why the apparent contradiction is there. As I've asked him several times: what am I missing in his position?
Tentatively, I think Kemi's position may be of a different type, in that she sees 2 or 3 horses, and does not know which one to ride or if she can cover all of them.
If the conflict gets a really great split between Europe - USA (eg NATO split) - then both Reform and Kemi will need to the be on the UK side of the split. I don't think that in this country politicians can throw Ukraine away with contempt; in the US they can.
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war?
Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.
Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.
Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.
Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.
Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?
The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.
https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1892174821368201619
Perhaps if NI voted to merge with the Republic, and we decided decades later to invade and conquer the new republic ?
But even that doesn't really provide a close analogue.
But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
Polling suggest Reform voters come from across the political spectrum, the main driver for many appears to be social misinformation. It's no surprise that there's a big correlation between Reform voters and those who believe in conspiracy theories.
Have we had one before?
So it was all a big misunderstanding. Phew.
But what about in half a decade's time, when Russia has rebuilt thanks to the benefit of renewed trade with the US, while it spent the time destabilising the rump of Ukraine ? Along with the other former communist vassal states.
This isn't just about what happened in the next year - but whatever does will set the conditions for the next decade.
You're basically arguing that Europe can just look away while Ukraine is divided up by Putin and Trump, and go back to the comfortable place it's been in for the last couple of decades. That doesn't seem a realistic plan to me.
Poland itself was one election away from becoming a full on autocracy. Russian plans for it won't be military invasion.
If they don't have to, then a new sort of very unpleasant normal continuing the past will emerge, different but developmental.
If they do, then the last 80 years are ancient history, and basically the language is one of 'war footing' for UK, France, Germany, Poland, Canada etc. With all the consequences for tax, armed forces, nuclear, prosperity, priorities etc; all of which makes Brexit, EU, EFTA, EEA, SM, CU look little local difficulties.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n6PFJgPS2SQ
Oh, and Trump isn’t trying to unilaterally re-interpret the US constitution in such a way as to undo Johnson’s US citizenship claim. Under Trump’s interpretation, Johnson was never a US citizen.
The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.
The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
Legally, all of France is, as well.
I demand the 13 colonies be returned to me, personally.
A bubble shaped by malign forces and lax regulation on media ownership, social media algorithms, and so-called news channels.
And yet there is no interest in addressing the underlying vulnerabilities in our media system.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/major-incident-declared-after-second-sinkhole-opens-up-on-residential-surrey-str/
In the ship it was set horizontally to control direction of the turret. Very precisely and preventing any movement from the set direction.
IIRC at Jodrell Bank, they are used to control elevation and are vertical.
That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.
He could have said, Trump is a great friend whom I have a lot of respect for, but I disagree with him on Ukraine. But he couldn't bring himself to do that and in this way trashes what's left of his reputation. And I think he knows it.
More broadly it’s worth government scouting around to see if it can attract any newly footloose “international woke capital”. Even if 95% of the tech industry is happily jumping into bed with Trump and Musk, that 5% is a decent number.
However, the regular Daily Mail income demands that he attempts some kind of coherency in his public offerings.
Wow. This looks like absolutely amazing work analyzing the British and German railways by the FT. > "German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways"
https://x.com/thomasforth/status/1892178693688017016
That overall judgment is correct, but:
Line up your British operators as the FT have done and all the North British ones (except Merseyrail and Scotrail, because separated and/or devolved) are as bad or much worse than German railways. And the top performers are overwhelmingly in the South.
I know almost for certain that this delusion penetrated deeply within DfT and led to substantial cancellations of Northern investment. It was easy for people in London to look at averages pushed up by the hugely upgraded and brand new lines into London, sit back, and relax...
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/bundestagswahl-2025-so-realistisch-sind-die-steuerversprechen-der-parteien-a-ece4762c-2009-41f4-9fa5-2a5b7fd860cb
For example, the FDP : According to their ideas, a low earner with an annual income of 20,000 euros would have their tax burden reduced by 201 euros, which corresponds to around one percent. A high earner with a gross annual income of 120,000 euros would be better off by a whopping 7,715 euros, or 6.4 percent. According to the FDP plans, a single person with an average income of 40,000 euros would have their tax burden reduced by 1,507 euros, or 3.8 percent.
The plans of the AfD, which often portray themselves as the party of the disadvantaged and low earners, also mean that higher earners benefit more than those on low incomes - in some cases the effect is even stronger than with the FDP. According to the AfD's plans, a married couple with two children and a low annual gross income of 40,000 euros can expect a relief of 984 euros (2.5 percent of gross annual income). If the same family earned 180,000 euros, the relief would be a whopping 12,145 euros (6.7 percent of gross annual income).
The SPD and the Left Party , on the other hand, want to make high earners pay more in order to relieve the burden on small and medium incomes. The SPD wants 95 percent of the population to benefit from this relief, while the top earners, i.e. the top five percent of earners, should be taxed more heavily. The Left Party wants incomes of up to 16,800 euros per year to remain tax-free, but the party wants to tax top earners of over one million euros at up to 75 percent.
According to IW calculations, the FDP and AfD proposals are by far the most expensive. The additional burden on the state budget would amount to 104 and 100 billion euros respectively - and this despite the fact that the plans largely benefit top earners: In the AfD 's case, almost 41 percent of the costs (40.9 billion euros) are spent on easing the burden on the highest income decile, i.e. the top ten percent of households. Singles with a gross annual income of over 82,250 euros can be included in this group. The relief for the top one percent, i.e. the absolute top earners (from 179,140 euros gross annual income), would still amount to an impressive 16.5 billion euros or a good 16 percent of the total costs under the AfD proposal.
The SPD 's plan would result in additional costs of five billion euros. This would make it the most economical proposal.
Which might benefit both them and us.
Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.
But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/feb/19/manchester-united-compensation-dan-ashworth-after-five-months-revealed
Ban all dogs, except for working dogs.
At the very least, require all dog owners to have a license, pass a competency test, complete compulsory training and have insurance.
I simply ignore him as far as is possible, like any other troll.
I hope everyone is well.
The Faroe Islands' potty-mouthed foreign minister seems eager for some limelight:
https://www.politico.eu/article/top-faroe-islands-politician-donald-trump-greenland-arctic-global-tensions/
He'd probably have full underpants with joy if Trump said he wanted to annex the Faroe Islands as well as Greenland.
Rockall could be an ideal spot for some iconic construction work. Rich guests staying at the Turnberry could be flown out to it by helicopter.
Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?
Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.
The problem is that the Millennial centrist dad is about to become the most important part of the electorate.
Will they?
it's surely less embarrassing to be a centrist parent/guardian than a parent/guardian who tries to be edgy by swearing on the internet?
We simply cannot rely on America anymore and we need to find our own solutions.
I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.
Give it a few weeks.
I don't think this war ends this year judging by how it's going and the massive arms shipments domestically and internationally being sent to either side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp1MHKYX0_4
It really means Social Democrat Dad, which isn't centrist.
Josias has had plenty of garbage spouted at him but has taken it and replied , if you have such an inferiority complex then you should stay away from posting on social media where you are guaranteed brickbats regardless of opinion.
In turn the UK needs to keep pushing for de facto but no de jure membership of the EU single market.
But the first priority right now is defence.
TBF getting a PhD does imply training on the job - that's what the supervisor and the student do - but the actual qualification does demand the contribution to knowledge. However, that's UK specific. (Some Usonian PhDs do include a course work element, effectively therefore partly a MSc (etc) by study.)
In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.
In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.
That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.