It's interesting that every time people talk about peak Reform they poll ever higher.
Surely peak Reform will be 100% after they ban opposition parties?
Nah, even Putin only ends up in the mid 90s, or do you think Nigey is potentially even more popular that Vlad?
That’s Der Nige to you.
Darth Nigel
"Good, I can feel your anger! I am defenceless. Take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete!"
Dan Hodges agrees with Kemi. Six weeks ago no tariffs on UK trade to USA, today 10%
Bit harsh to blame Starmer for damage done by the leader of another country.
Yea but the whiney old twat deserves every bit of opprobrium that can be poured on his boring freeby-grabbing head, even if it isn't his fault.
Quite the opposite. He's a diligent dedicated man and deserves your support. By all means vote against Labour come the election but in the meantime get behind your Labour PM.
Face up to it, he is a dud with no charisma, a poor communicator and has no discernable plan or vision other than crisis management. His crisis management being particularly problematic as he is the instigator of many of the government's crises, not least through having the equally poor Reeves as his sidekick.
That's harsh but it's fair in two respects. He does lack charisma and he's a manager not a visionary. However a charismatic persona and a grand vision are imo overrated in politics compared to competence and good intentions. I'd always take the latter. And it's what we need. We're a free and prosperous country which could be better in many respects, not a broken shithole of a place.
I agree on that. Britain is a lovely place to be on a day like this.
I think the doom and gloom is heavily overdone by those plastic patriots determined to talk down the country.
I've noticed a tendency among the kind of people who like to complain about misinformation to stubbornly cling to an idea of the way things are that is based purely on the way they would like things to be, or the way they imagine things to be, or even the way they remember that things used to be. They are impervious to anything that contradicts this, even if it is meticulously factual and supported by evidence from sources that they would normally regard as authoritative.
Very true. The shoplifting argument was vivid evidence of this
The blinkered centrist Dads insisting it's "always been like this", "I worked in retail a decade ago, nothing has changed"
This despite PBers offering personal lived experience
Even when we showed the Centrist Dads the actual hard evidence - a ten fold increase in shoplifting in ten years, according to the Economist - they then claimed they'd always accepted this, or they pretended that it was some statistical anomaly
Same with immigration; centrist Dads are defending numbers they’d never have believed possible a decade ago, and calling people who want a return to coalition style figures of 250k ‘Fascists’
Are they? I have genuinely no idea why the Tories (hardly centrist dads) presided over such a huge rise in net migration and I've literally not heard anyone on the centre left say that it was great. Indeed, most have simply pointed out the irony that it was Brexit that seems to have facilitated the surge. I mean, it is pretty funny. Personally I don't have strong feelings about immigration. I would just like to have a system that is fair and humane and balances competing imperatives of the labour market, fairness for existing workers, pressure on housing and infrastructure, allowing universities to meet global demand from students, and international obligations to help refugees. People on here bang on about it too much though, it's getting boring.
Immigration is now starting to fall net after Rishi raised the wage requirement for visas and cut the ability of dependents to come in too
Ironically among the skills we need is that of care workers and nurses who are paid nowhere near the levels Rishi set. Especially care workers.
Care work, with all due respect, is not skilled work. Anyone can do it, it does not require any qualification. Ideally you'd want the people doing it to have certain qualities, eg being caring, but just dumping it on anyone who will take minimum wage is not a way to get that.
If care homes want staff, they could offer significantly more than minimum wage, then they would find many people who want to do the job - but why work cleaning people's bums for minimum wage when you could do something far less gross, for more money, by eg working minimum wage plus tips in hospitality?
The only comparator for this is the short but amazing rise of the SDP in the early 80s, right?
Then Thatch got saved by Galtieri and they fell away. IIRC. It was a looooooong time ago
Maybe Starmer can persuade Putin to invade Gibraltar, badly
The SDP/Alliance polled 50% but the Tories were leading in some polls before the invasion of The Malvinas.
Was it as high as 50%??! That's even more spectacular than I remember
However there are major differences between Reform and the SDP, and the most important is the one that tells me this might be a new permanent change, not a fleeting weirdness like the Alliance: Reform are just part of a wider vibeshift to the populist right across the West - from Le Pen to Meloni, from Trump to the AfD to the Danish social democrats adopting hard right migration policies, and many other examples: some hopeful some depressing
This is a secular change in mood across the western world, not a uniquely British blip
Yes, in December 1981 Mori had the following
Con 23%
Labour 23.5%
Alliance 50.5%
A fortnight before the invasion in March 1982 Mori had it as
If 97 of the unarmed men die, and the 98th kills the silverback gorilla, then did the men "win"?
I've given this some thought.
Partly depends on the location. Easier if in a gorilla enclosure. Tougher if the situation is open ground. But gorillas need trees to nest in, so there's likely to be trees.
Say the gorilla is a BIG bastard - he still won't exceed 500 pound. Not quite 36 stone.
Let's say the men are 12 stone each - that is a total mass of men of 1,200 stone.
Firstly, surround the gorilla. Say 10 deep. The chaps facing the gorilla are going to get a hell of a beating. But maybe only the first three or four rows. The rest just pile in to crush the gorilla. Easier if there is a tree to push him against, easier still if a wall. Those at his back can soon pin his arms and legs. The weight of dead bloke bodies will also cause the gorilla to lose mobility and movement. Let's say he kills twenty guys - that is still 240 stone or well over one and a half tonnes pressing down on him. By now, the gorilla has the dead weight of a small car on his body, with four more cars crushing into him.
Even if nobody manages to get a choke hold on him, I suspect he would not last more than a minute before he is asphyxiated. 80 guys - some admittedly maimed - would then have to ensure that they were not crushing each other.
It would require a lot of teamwork, but sheer weight and numbers are too great for the gorilla to beat off.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
If 97 of the unarmed men die, and the 98th kills the silverback gorilla, then did the men "win"?
Capt. Miller: You see, when... when you end up killing one of your men, you see, you tell yourself it happened so you could save the lives of two or three or ten others. Maybe a hundred others. Do you know how many men I've lost under my command? Sgt. Horvath: How many? Capt. Miller: Ninety-four. But that means I've saved the lives of ten times that many, doesn't it? Maybe even twenty, right? Twenty times as many? And that's how simple it is. That's how you... that's how you rationalize on making the choice between the mission and the man.
Pike makes the same point in The Age of Madness trilogy.
“I tell myself I take one life, in order to save ten more.”
If 97 of the unarmed men die, and the 98th kills the silverback gorilla, then did the men "win"?
I've given this some thought.
Partly depends on the location. Easier if in a gorilla enclosure. Tougher if the situation is open ground. But gorillas need trees to nest in, so there's likely to be trees.
Say the gorilla is a BIG bastard - he still won't exceed 500 pound. Not quite 36 stone.
Let's say the men are 12 stone each - that is a total mass of men of 1,200 stone.
Firstly, surround the gorilla. Say 10 deep. The chaps facing the gorilla are going to get a hell of a beating. But maybe only the first three or four rows. The rest just pile in to crush the gorilla. Easier if there is a tree to push him against, easier still if a wall. Those at his back can soon pin his arms and legs. The weight of dead bloke bodies will also cause the gorilla to lose mobility and movement. Let's say he kills twenty guys - that is still 240 stone or well over one and a half tonnes pressing down on him. By now, the gorilla has the dead weight of a small car on his body, with four more cars crushing into him.
Even if nobody manages to get a choke hold on him, I suspect he would not last more than a minute before he is asphyxiated. 80 guys - some admittedly maimed - would then have to ensure that they were not crushing each other.
It would require a lot of teamwork, but sheer weight and numbers are too great for the gorilla to beat off.
Surrounding the gorilla is definitely the right option. And then I think the right thing to do is to simply wait. The gorilla isn't going to want to charge a mass of people much larger than it.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Only if you're talking of yourself and Leon.
Is it possible ? Sure. Inevitable ? Nonsense.
Also, Farage has no solutions either.
I gave you a 'like' but to be fair he does have some solutions.
(I'm reviewing a draft of a piece looking at making the Greenways properly accessible as the start of an alternative off-road travel network for walking, wheeling, cycling. They seem to have quite a lot of anti-wheelchair barriers of various sorts.)
I'm happy to PM a link if anyone wants to comment.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Only if you're talking of yourself and Leon.
Is it possible ? Sure. Inevitable ? Nonsense.
Also, Farage has no solutions either.
I gave you a 'like' but to be fair he does have some solutions.
I just don't think they're very good ones.
That was what I meant, of course. Everyone pretends they have solutions.
In Reform's favour, it's possible (for example) that Green voters will make like the Michigan Palestinian voters, and refuse to vote tactically to keep them out.
Against that, someone like me might consider voting Labour for the first time in my life to do just that.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Keir Starmer embodies overreliance on a poorly regulated City, the decline of developed world economic hegemony, decades of living beyond our means, a global pandemic, the return of inflation and consequent end of cheap money, the collapse of the western defence alliance, and the hit to global trade from America's lurch to protectionism?
(I'm reviewing a draft of a piece looking at making the Greenways properly accessible as the start of an alternative off-road travel network for walking, wheeling, cycling. They seem to have quite a lot of anti-wheelchair barriers of various sorts.)
I'm happy to PM a link if anyone wants to comment.
Yes. I was largely responsible for initiating one of them. But I don't think there is an issue you mention with that one.
Dan Hodges agrees with Kemi. Six weeks ago no tariffs on UK trade to USA, today 10%
Bit harsh to blame Starmer for damage done by the leader of another country.
Yea but the whiney old twat deserves every bit of opprobrium that can be poured on his boring freeby-grabbing head, even if it isn't his fault.
Quite the opposite. He's a diligent dedicated man and deserves your support. By all means vote against Labour come the election but in the meantime get behind your Labour PM.
Face up to it, he is a dud with no charisma, a poor communicator and has no discernable plan or vision other than crisis management. His crisis management being particularly problematic as he is the instigator of many of the government's crises, not least through having the equally poor Reeves as his sidekick.
That's harsh but it's fair in two respects. He does lack charisma and he's a manager not a visionary. However a charismatic persona and a grand vision are imo overrated in politics compared to competence and good intentions. I'd always take the latter. And it's what we need. We're a free and prosperous country which could be better in many respects, not a broken shithole of a place.
I agree on that. Britain is a lovely place to be on a day like this.
I think the doom and gloom is heavily overdone by those plastic patriots determined to talk down the country.
I've noticed a tendency among the kind of people who like to complain about misinformation to stubbornly cling to an idea of the way things are that is based purely on the way they would like things to be, or the way they imagine things to be, or even the way they remember that things used to be. They are impervious to anything that contradicts this, even if it is meticulously factual and supported by evidence from sources that they would normally regard as authoritative.
Very true. The shoplifting argument was vivid evidence of this
The blinkered centrist Dads insisting it's "always been like this", "I worked in retail a decade ago, nothing has changed"
This despite PBers offering personal lived experience
Even when we showed the Centrist Dads the actual hard evidence - a ten fold increase in shoplifting in ten years, according to the Economist - they then claimed they'd always accepted this, or they pretended that it was some statistical anomaly
Same with immigration; centrist Dads are defending numbers they’d never have believed possible a decade ago, and calling people who want a return to coalition style figures of 250k ‘Fascists’
Are they? I have genuinely no idea why the Tories (hardly centrist dads) presided over such a huge rise in net migration and I've literally not heard anyone on the centre left say that it was great. Indeed, most have simply pointed out the irony that it was Brexit that seems to have facilitated the surge. I mean, it is pretty funny. Personally I don't have strong feelings about immigration. I would just like to have a system that is fair and humane and balances competing imperatives of the labour market, fairness for existing workers, pressure on housing and infrastructure, allowing universities to meet global demand from students, and international obligations to help refugees. People on here bang on about it too much though, it's getting boring.
Immigration is now starting to fall net after Rishi raised the wage requirement for visas and cut the ability of dependents to come in too
Ironically among the skills we need is that of care workers and nurses who are paid nowhere near the levels Rishi set. Especially care workers.
Care work, with all due respect, is not skilled work. Anyone can do it, it does not require any qualification. Ideally you'd want the people doing it to have certain qualities, eg being caring, but just dumping it on anyone who will take minimum wage is not a way to get that.
If care homes want staff, they could offer significantly more than minimum wage, then they would find many people who want to do the job - but why work cleaning people's bums for minimum wage when you could do something far less gross, for more money, by eg working minimum wage plus tips in hospitality?
The fundamental problem is that (a) most people in care homes have their bills paid for buy the local authority, (b) the number of people needing care homes grows every year, and (c) local councils have no money.
Care homes have not been enormously profitable businesses: Four Seasons Health was one of the largest care home providers in the UK, and went bust in 2019. They ran 322 home and had 22,000 staff. Before then, Southern Cross Healthcare, which was the largest provider in the UK, went bust.
(I'm reviewing a draft of a piece looking at making the Greenways properly accessible as the start of an alternative off-road travel network for walking, wheeling, cycling. They seem to have quite a lot of anti-wheelchair barriers of various sorts.)
I'm happy to PM a link if anyone wants to comment.
Yes. I was largely responsible for initiating one of them. But I don't think there is an issue you mention with that one.
Would you like me to comment if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful.
Depends how clever the Gorilla is. If he's anything like Jack Reacher, the men are fecked.
Jeb: [chuckles] Are you kidding? It's five against one. Jack Reacher: [shakes his head] It's *three* against one. Jeb: [perplexed] *How* do you figure? Jack Reacher: Well, once I take out the leader, which is you, I'll have to contend with one or two enthusiastic wingmen. The last two guys, they always run.
(I'm reviewing a draft of a piece looking at making the Greenways properly accessible as the start of an alternative off-road travel network for walking, wheeling, cycling. They seem to have quite a lot of anti-wheelchair barriers of various sorts.)
I'm happy to PM a link if anyone wants to comment.
Yes. I was largely responsible for initiating one of them. But I don't think there is an issue you mention with that one.
Would you like me to comment if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful.
Sorry - a bit of a typo there. I mean:
Would you be interested in commenting if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful. I try to talk as widely as possible - attempts just to impose things are asking for pushback, where they may not actually be any real disagreement.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
(I'm reviewing a draft of a piece looking at making the Greenways properly accessible as the start of an alternative off-road travel network for walking, wheeling, cycling. They seem to have quite a lot of anti-wheelchair barriers of various sorts.)
I'm happy to PM a link if anyone wants to comment.
Yes. I was largely responsible for initiating one of them. But I don't think there is an issue you mention with that one.
Would you like me to comment if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful.
Sorry - a bit of a typo there. I mean:
Would you be interested in commenting if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful. I try to talk as widely as possible - attempts just to impose things are asking for pushback, where they may not actually be any real disagreement.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
Dan Hodges agrees with Kemi. Six weeks ago no tariffs on UK trade to USA, today 10%
Bit harsh to blame Starmer for damage done by the leader of another country.
Yea but the whiney old twat deserves every bit of opprobrium that can be poured on his boring freeby-grabbing head, even if it isn't his fault.
Quite the opposite. He's a diligent dedicated man and deserves your support. By all means vote against Labour come the election but in the meantime get behind your Labour PM.
Face up to it, he is a dud with no charisma, a poor communicator and has no discernable plan or vision other than crisis management. His crisis management being particularly problematic as he is the instigator of many of the government's crises, not least through having the equally poor Reeves as his sidekick.
That's harsh but it's fair in two respects. He does lack charisma and he's a manager not a visionary. However a charismatic persona and a grand vision are imo overrated in politics compared to competence and good intentions. I'd always take the latter. And it's what we need. We're a free and prosperous country which could be better in many respects, not a broken shithole of a place.
I agree on that. Britain is a lovely place to be on a day like this.
I think the doom and gloom is heavily overdone by those plastic patriots determined to talk down the country.
I've noticed a tendency among the kind of people who like to complain about misinformation to stubbornly cling to an idea of the way things are that is based purely on the way they would like things to be, or the way they imagine things to be, or even the way they remember that things used to be. They are impervious to anything that contradicts this, even if it is meticulously factual and supported by evidence from sources that they would normally regard as authoritative.
Very true. The shoplifting argument was vivid evidence of this
The blinkered centrist Dads insisting it's "always been like this", "I worked in retail a decade ago, nothing has changed"
This despite PBers offering personal lived experience
Even when we showed the Centrist Dads the actual hard evidence - a ten fold increase in shoplifting in ten years, according to the Economist - they then claimed they'd always accepted this, or they pretended that it was some statistical anomaly
Same with immigration; centrist Dads are defending numbers they’d never have believed possible a decade ago, and calling people who want a return to coalition style figures of 250k ‘Fascists’
Are they? I have genuinely no idea why the Tories (hardly centrist dads) presided over such a huge rise in net migration and I've literally not heard anyone on the centre left say that it was great. Indeed, most have simply pointed out the irony that it was Brexit that seems to have facilitated the surge. I mean, it is pretty funny. Personally I don't have strong feelings about immigration. I would just like to have a system that is fair and humane and balances competing imperatives of the labour market, fairness for existing workers, pressure on housing and infrastructure, allowing universities to meet global demand from students, and international obligations to help refugees. People on here bang on about it too much though, it's getting boring.
Immigration is now starting to fall net after Rishi raised the wage requirement for visas and cut the ability of dependents to come in too
Ironically among the skills we need is that of care workers and nurses who are paid nowhere near the levels Rishi set. Especially care workers.
Care work, with all due respect, is not skilled work. Anyone can do it, it does not require any qualification. Ideally you'd want the people doing it to have certain qualities, eg being caring, but just dumping it on anyone who will take minimum wage is not a way to get that.
If care homes want staff, they could offer significantly more than minimum wage, then they would find many people who want to do the job - but why work cleaning people's bums for minimum wage when you could do something far less gross, for more money, by eg working minimum wage plus tips in hospitality?
The fundamental problem is that (a) most people in care homes have their bills paid for buy the local authority, (b) the number of people needing care homes grows every year, and (c) local councils have no money.
Care homes have not been enormously profitable businesses: Four Seasons Health was one of the largest care home providers in the UK, and went bust in 2019. They ran 322 home and had 22,000 staff. Before then, Southern Cross Healthcare, which was the largest provider in the UK, went bust.
Doesn't answer the point. All public services would be cheaper if we could just get people to work for minimum wage. Cut minimum wage and they'll be even cheaper still.
Doesn't make "prepared to work for minimum wage" a special skill or qualification.
To import people as a "missing skill" when that "skill" is "prepared to work for minimum wage" makes a mockery of the whole system.
If wages go up, then authorities will just have to pay what they have to pay under service obligations, and the central government will have to adjust grants accordingly, and that will just have to be dealt with accordingly. Doesn't mean we need to import people prepared to work for minimum wage and call that a skill.
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
Lord, the hubris. Have some people on here ever looked back 4 years at their comments? Even 3? A number of PB regulars speak with the confidence of gods but have the hindsight of drunk historians.
Doubt, as someone said, may be uncomfortable but certainty is absurd.
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
Out-of-place animal, ie an alien big cat (not from the Zoo)
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
Wild boar, which have been know to attack sheep and would - as omnivores - potentially feast on a carcass? These are reestablished in the Weald.
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
In theory it could have just keeled over and then various carrion eaters could have torn it up.
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
Foxes? I'd imagine that they might take on a weakened sheep.
So it turns out Find Out Now aren't dodgy, they are more like Find Out First
Pay attention to the ones they do/don’t caveat as they’ve added this caveat.
This poll was initiated solely by Find Out Now and not funded by any third party
Sorry, I am confused! Genuinely. Isn't this poll BMG?
After the election last week shy Reformers seem to have decided fash is fine.
Perhaps they have been replaced by shy Tories and Labourites.
"Fash"
Grow up. Do you honestly believe Reform under Nigel Farage are "fascist", or anything even close to it? Because they're not. Not at all. The comparison is juvenile and wanky and makes you sound like a 13 year old
If a proper actual Fascist party approaches power in the UK you will bloody well notice it, but you will have no words to describe the exceptional nature of this evolution, because you used them all up on Reform
The guys a complete spacker. Just ignore him. His politics is analogous to Rik from the Young ones. He also seems to get off on baiting you. Just ignore. Your experience here won’t be worse for it.
(I'm reviewing a draft of a piece looking at making the Greenways properly accessible as the start of an alternative off-road travel network for walking, wheeling, cycling. They seem to have quite a lot of anti-wheelchair barriers of various sorts.)
I'm happy to PM a link if anyone wants to comment.
Yes. I was largely responsible for initiating one of them. But I don't think there is an issue you mention with that one.
Would you like me to comment if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful.
Sorry - a bit of a typo there. I mean:
Would you be interested in commenting if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful. I try to talk as widely as possible - attempts just to impose things are asking for pushback, where they may not actually be any real disagreement.
OK. I am at wd02@btopenworld.com
Thank-you - I really appreciate that.
I'm out for dinner, so I'll send an email later on.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Come, come. Like myself you were shocked at the insanity of voting to leave the European Union. The joint architect of that calamity was Mr Farage. I don't particularly like Starmer, but until he lost his bottle we were both rooting for him to win us that second referendum.
So when the gloves are off I am sure it will be pointed out that the character who "embodies everything that has gone wrong" is Captain Chaos Farage.
Has President Trump f*cked the World Cup next year, that the USA, Canada and Mexico are co-hosting?
Either:
1 - People too scared to visit for the several reasons we know about, and don't. 2 - Insufficient air transport capacity across the country for fans needing to get to cities they don't know about in advance, as it's determined by match results. There aren't exactly a lot of alternatives. 3 - Some services having been gutted by Trump's destruction of the administrative State. 4 - Border restrictions USA vs Mexico and Canada? 5 - Given Trump & Co's incompetence, will be it like the 1936 Olympics run by the Marx Brothers?
If yes, why? If not, why not?
people were happy to go to russia and the middle east, why wouldn't they go to the us
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
Wild boar, which have been know to attack sheep and would - as omnivores - potentially feast on a carcass? These are reestablished in the Weald.
I was going to suggest Wild Boar. I saw one within five feet of me in the hills above Nice recently and there is evidence of them everywhere. Apparently they are know to attack lambs.
So it turns out Find Out Now aren't dodgy, they are more like Find Out First
Pay attention to the ones they do/don’t caveat as they’ve added this caveat.
This poll was initiated solely by Find Out Now and not funded by any third party
Sorry, I am confused! Genuinely. Isn't this poll BMG?
After the election last week shy Reformers seem to have decided fash is fine.
Perhaps they have been replaced by shy Tories and Labourites.
"Fash"
Grow up. Do you honestly believe Reform under Nigel Farage are "fascist", or anything even close to it? Because they're not. Not at all. The comparison is juvenile and wanky and makes you sound like a 13 year old
If a proper actual Fascist party approaches power in the UK you will bloody well notice it, but you will have no words to describe the exceptional nature of this evolution, because you used them all up on Reform
As if calling someone a fascist on here would wound it’s target rather than prompt an eye roll at the pure wallyness of the name caller
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago a sheep was attacked and killed, and eaten, in my vineyard. The farmer was understandably upset.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them - Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes - Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports - Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
Wild boar, which have been know to attack sheep and would - as omnivores - potentially feast on a carcass? These are reestablished in the Weald.
I was going to suggest Wild Boar. I saw one within five feet of me in the hills above Nice recently and there is evidence of them everywhere. Apparently they are know to attack lambs.
Dan Hodges agrees with Kemi. Six weeks ago no tariffs on UK trade to USA, today 10%
Bit harsh to blame Starmer for damage done by the leader of another country.
Yea but the whiney old twat deserves every bit of opprobrium that can be poured on his boring freeby-grabbing head, even if it isn't his fault.
Quite the opposite. He's a diligent dedicated man and deserves your support. By all means vote against Labour come the election but in the meantime get behind your Labour PM.
Face up to it, he is a dud with no charisma, a poor communicator and has no discernable plan or vision other than crisis management. His crisis management being particularly problematic as he is the instigator of many of the government's crises, not least through having the equally poor Reeves as his sidekick.
That's harsh but it's fair in two respects. He does lack charisma and he's a manager not a visionary. However a charismatic persona and a grand vision are imo overrated in politics compared to competence and good intentions. I'd always take the latter. And it's what we need. We're a free and prosperous country which could be better in many respects, not a broken shithole of a place.
I agree on that. Britain is a lovely place to be on a day like this.
I think the doom and gloom is heavily overdone by those plastic patriots determined to talk down the country.
I've noticed a tendency among the kind of people who like to complain about misinformation to stubbornly cling to an idea of the way things are that is based purely on the way they would like things to be, or the way they imagine things to be, or even the way they remember that things used to be. They are impervious to anything that contradicts this, even if it is meticulously factual and supported by evidence from sources that they would normally regard as authoritative.
Very true. The shoplifting argument was vivid evidence of this
The blinkered centrist Dads insisting it's "always been like this", "I worked in retail a decade ago, nothing has changed"
This despite PBers offering personal lived experience
Even when we showed the Centrist Dads the actual hard evidence - a ten fold increase in shoplifting in ten years, according to the Economist - they then claimed they'd always accepted this, or they pretended that it was some statistical anomaly
Same with immigration; centrist Dads are defending numbers they’d never have believed possible a decade ago, and calling people who want a return to coalition style figures of 250k ‘Fascists’
Are they? I have genuinely no idea why the Tories (hardly centrist dads) presided over such a huge rise in net migration and I've literally not heard anyone on the centre left say that it was great. Indeed, most have simply pointed out the irony that it was Brexit that seems to have facilitated the surge. I mean, it is pretty funny. Personally I don't have strong feelings about immigration. I would just like to have a system that is fair and humane and balances competing imperatives of the labour market, fairness for existing workers, pressure on housing and infrastructure, allowing universities to meet global demand from students, and international obligations to help refugees. People on here bang on about it too much though, it's getting boring.
Immigration is now starting to fall net after Rishi raised the wage requirement for visas and cut the ability of dependents to come in too
Ironically among the skills we need is that of care workers and nurses who are paid nowhere near the levels Rishi set. Especially care workers.
Care work, with all due respect, is not skilled work. Anyone can do it, it does not require any qualification. Ideally you'd want the people doing it to have certain qualities, eg being caring, but just dumping it on anyone who will take minimum wage is not a way to get that.
If care homes want staff, they could offer significantly more than minimum wage, then they would find many people who want to do the job - but why work cleaning people's bums for minimum wage when you could do something far less gross, for more money, by eg working minimum wage plus tips in hospitality?
The fundamental problem is that (a) most people in care homes have their bills paid for buy the local authority, (b) the number of people needing care homes grows every year, and (c) local councils have no money.
Care homes have not been enormously profitable businesses: Four Seasons Health was one of the largest care home providers in the UK, and went bust in 2019. They ran 322 home and had 22,000 staff. Before then, Southern Cross Healthcare, which was the largest provider in the UK, went bust.
Doesn't answer the point. All public services would be cheaper if we could just get people to work for minimum wage. Cut minimum wage and they'll be even cheaper still.
Doesn't make "prepared to work for minimum wage" a special skill or qualification.
To import people as a "missing skill" when that "skill" is "prepared to work for minimum wage" makes a mockery of the whole system.
If wages go up, then authorities will just have to pay what they have to pay under service obligations, and the central government will have to adjust grants accordingly, and that will just have to be dealt with accordingly. Doesn't mean we need to import people prepared to work for minimum wage and call that a skill.
I think that's fair: I was really just emphasizing why there has been so much pressure from local authorities on the central government to allow lots of unskilled labour in.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
"Let me and William"
They both work
No, because you and William are the OBJECT of the "Letting".
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
"Let me and William"
They both work
No, because you and William are the OBJECT of the "Letting".
The meaning was perfectly clear, how is it improved by insisting on only one 'proper' way? Language evolves.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
"Let me and William"
They both work
No, because you and William are the OBJECT of the "Letting".
Hey Sunil,
Have you travelled on the new Metro rolling stock in Newcastle yet ?
I did on Tuesday. Neither impressed nor unimpressed.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
"Let me and William"
They both work
No, because you and William are the OBJECT of the "Letting".
The meaning was perfectly clear, how is it improved by insisting on only one 'proper' way? Language evolves.
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
"Let me and William"
They both work
No, because you and William are the OBJECT of the "Letting".
The meaning was perfectly clear, how is it improved by insisting on only one 'proper' way? Language evolves.
Having my pizza in the garden while the relentless Scottish sun beats down, not due to set to well after 9pm today - in early May already only a few minutes short of the latest sunset I will be getting in late June back on the island. It’s still hot enough that the dog is choosing to sit in the shade.
It continues to amaze that after such a tumultuous six political years, some PB’ers seem to think the wind is now set and nothing further of significance will change until the election a whole four long years hence.
My firm prediction is that there will be further, dramatic, currently unexpected significant change. Being currently unexpected, I don’t know what they will be.
Having my pizza in the garden while the relentless Scottish sun beats down, not due to set to well after 9pm today - in early May already only a few minutes short of the latest sunset I will be getting in late June back on the island. It’s still hot enough that the dog is choosing to sit in the shade.
It continues to amaze that after such a tumultuous six political years, some PB’ers seem to think the wind is now set and nothing further of significance will change until the election a whole four long years hence.
My firm prediction is that there will be further, dramatic, currently unexpected significant change. Being currently unexpected, I don’t know what they will be.
Having my pizza in the garden while the relentless Scottish sun beats down, not due to set to well after 9pm today - in early May already only a few minutes short of the latest sunset I will be getting in late June back on the island. It’s still hot enough that the dog is choosing to sit in the shade.
It continues to amaze that after such a tumultuous six political years, some PB’ers seem to think the wind is now set and nothing further of significance will change until the election a whole four long years hence.
My firm prediction is that there will be further, dramatic, currently unexpected significant change. Being currently unexpected, I don’t know what they will be.
That's a 7.5% return if they don't get a majority in 4 years time, less than 2% per annum, doesn't even meet inflation.
And in the extremely unlikely, but entirely possible, event that they do actually get a majority then you lose your stake, all to try to get a return below inflation.
Dan Hodges agrees with Kemi. Six weeks ago no tariffs on UK trade to USA, today 10%
Bit harsh to blame Starmer for damage done by the leader of another country.
Yea but the whiney old twat deserves every bit of opprobrium that can be poured on his boring freeby-grabbing head, even if it isn't his fault.
Quite the opposite. He's a diligent dedicated man and deserves your support. By all means vote against Labour come the election but in the meantime get behind your Labour PM.
Face up to it, he is a dud with no charisma, a poor communicator and has no discernable plan or vision other than crisis management. His crisis management being particularly problematic as he is the instigator of many of the government's crises, not least through having the equally poor Reeves as his sidekick.
That's harsh but it's fair in two respects. He does lack charisma and he's a manager not a visionary. However a charismatic persona and a grand vision are imo overrated in politics compared to competence and good intentions. I'd always take the latter. And it's what we need. We're a free and prosperous country which could be better in many respects, not a broken shithole of a place.
I agree on that. Britain is a lovely place to be on a day like this.
I think the doom and gloom is heavily overdone by those plastic patriots determined to talk down the country.
I've noticed a tendency among the kind of people who like to complain about misinformation to stubbornly cling to an idea of the way things are that is based purely on the way they would like things to be, or the way they imagine things to be, or even the way they remember that things used to be. They are impervious to anything that contradicts this, even if it is meticulously factual and supported by evidence from sources that they would normally regard as authoritative.
Very true. The shoplifting argument was vivid evidence of this
The blinkered centrist Dads insisting it's "always been like this", "I worked in retail a decade ago, nothing has changed"
This despite PBers offering personal lived experience
Even when we showed the Centrist Dads the actual hard evidence - a ten fold increase in shoplifting in ten years, according to the Economist - they then claimed they'd always accepted this, or they pretended that it was some statistical anomaly
Same with immigration; centrist Dads are defending numbers they’d never have believed possible a decade ago, and calling people who want a return to coalition style figures of 250k ‘Fascists’
Are they? I have genuinely no idea why the Tories (hardly centrist dads) presided over such a huge rise in net migration and I've literally not heard anyone on the centre left say that it was great. Indeed, most have simply pointed out the irony that it was Brexit that seems to have facilitated the surge. I mean, it is pretty funny. Personally I don't have strong feelings about immigration. I would just like to have a system that is fair and humane and balances competing imperatives of the labour market, fairness for existing workers, pressure on housing and infrastructure, allowing universities to meet global demand from students, and international obligations to help refugees. People on here bang on about it too much though, it's getting boring.
Immigration is now starting to fall net after Rishi raised the wage requirement for visas and cut the ability of dependents to come in too
Ironically among the skills we need is that of care workers and nurses who are paid nowhere near the levels Rishi set. Especially care workers.
Care work, with all due respect, is not skilled work. Anyone can do it, it does not require any qualification. Ideally you'd want the people doing it to have certain qualities, eg being caring, but just dumping it on anyone who will take minimum wage is not a way to get that.
If care homes want staff, they could offer significantly more than minimum wage, then they would find many people who want to do the job - but why work cleaning people's bums for minimum wage when you could do something far less gross, for more money, by eg working minimum wage plus tips in hospitality?
The fundamental problem is that (a) most people in care homes have their bills paid for buy the local authority, (b) the number of people needing care homes grows every year, and (c) local councils have no money.
Care homes have not been enormously profitable businesses: Four Seasons Health was one of the largest care home providers in the UK, and went bust in 2019. They ran 322 home and had 22,000 staff. Before then, Southern Cross Healthcare, which was the largest provider in the UK, went bust.
Doesn't answer the point. All public services would be cheaper if we could just get people to work for minimum wage. Cut minimum wage and they'll be even cheaper still.
Doesn't make "prepared to work for minimum wage" a special skill or qualification.
To import people as a "missing skill" when that "skill" is "prepared to work for minimum wage" makes a mockery of the whole system.
If wages go up, then authorities will just have to pay what they have to pay under service obligations, and the central government will have to adjust grants accordingly, and that will just have to be dealt with accordingly. Doesn't mean we need to import people prepared to work for minimum wage and call that a skill.
I think that's fair: I was really just emphasizing why there has been so much pressure from local authorities on the central government to allow lots of unskilled labour in.
I have a solution to the care crisis. We should pay the Libyan Coastguard to give us all the refugees they are stockpiling. We could then employ them for nothing, apart from room and board. This would extra awesome, since it would really reduce the costs.
This year, above average sunspot activity has allowed them to be seen way much further south than is usual.
But, despite periodic alerts from the aurora watch app, where I live, to the south of the highest point on the island, there’s no chance of my seeing them from home. Being able to grow olives and have wall lizards and bougainvillea in my garden is my only consolation.
During my Atlantic crossing last autumn, one of the days coincided with significant aurora activity, but I’d closed my cabin curtains and didn’t trouble to look out before bed. Next morning, the Internet was awash with dramatic photos taken from the ship.
Up here in Scotland, I’ve stayed in places with great open sky views to the north. But the sunspots have failed to deliver. Tonight, there’s a sign of a small buildup, but it wont be dark for a few hours yet. Will it deliver?
On Reform, one thing that nobody is taking into account that it's a One Man Band. Nobody is considering whether Farage has the health or energy for 4 years' slog until the next GE.
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
That's a 7.5% return if they don't get a majority in 4 years time, less than 2% per annum, doesn't even meet inflation.
And in the extremely unlikely, but entirely possible, event that they do actually get a majority then you lose your stake, all to try to get a return below inflation.
Avoid.
You don’t think, as the Trump slump spreads around the world, interest rates will soon be back to near zero?
On Reform, one thing that nobody is taking into account that it's a One Man Band. Nobody is considering whether Farage has the health or energy for 4 years' slog until the next GE.
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
The really interesting thing is if he does collapse, to what extent do the Tories benefit? Expectations of their demise may be well short of the mark. That anger at Labour has to go somewhere.
On Reform, one thing that nobody is taking into account that it's a One Man Band. Nobody is considering whether Farage has the health or energy for 4 years' slog until the next GE.
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
The really interesting thing is if he does collapse, to what extent do the Tories benefit? Expectations of their demise may be well short of the mark. That anger at Labour has to go somewhere.
On Reform, one thing that nobody is taking into account that it's a One Man Band. Nobody is considering whether Farage has the health or energy for 4 years' slog until the next GE.
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
Farage looked a bit younger than his age until about 2015. Can't think what's happened since then except Brexit.
On Reform, one thing that nobody is taking into account that it's a One Man Band. Nobody is considering whether Farage has the health or energy for 4 years' slog until the next GE.
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
The really interesting thing is if he does collapse, to what extent do the Tories benefit? Expectations of their demise may be well short of the mark. That anger at Labour has to go somewhere.
Lib Dems?
I believe you might be underestimating the utter hatred for the Tories. They have dropped the ball.
Labour if they get something right they could improve. Granted, with yesterday's disastrous capitulation (although duly noted only by Kemi and Dan Hodges) that is looking a long way off.
Having my pizza in the garden while the relentless Scottish sun beats down, not due to set to well after 9pm today - in early May already only a few minutes short of the latest sunset I will be getting in late June back on the island. It’s still hot enough that the dog is choosing to sit in the shade.
It continues to amaze that after such a tumultuous six political years, some PB’ers seem to think the wind is now set and nothing further of significance will change until the election a whole four long years hence.
My firm prediction is that there will be further, dramatic, currently unexpected significant change. Being currently unexpected, I don’t know what they will be.
We’ve got a pizza too. M&S. fennel and salami.
I had an ASDA Wensleydale Cheese, Petits Pois, and Red Pepper quiche for lunch. Wasn't half bad, actually
So it turns out Find Out Now aren't dodgy, they are more like Find Out First
Pay attention to the ones they do/don’t caveat as they’ve added this caveat.
This poll was initiated solely by Find Out Now and not funded by any third party
Sorry, I am confused! Genuinely. Isn't this poll BMG?
After the election last week shy Reformers seem to have decided fash is fine.
Perhaps they have been replaced by shy Tories and Labourites.
"Fash"
Grow up. Do you honestly believe Reform under Nigel Farage are "fascist", or anything even close to it? Because they're not. Not at all. The comparison is juvenile and wanky and makes you sound like a 13 year old
If a proper actual Fascist party approaches power in the UK you will bloody well notice it, but you will have no words to describe the exceptional nature of this evolution, because you used them all up on Reform
The guys a complete spacker. Just ignore him. His politics is analogous to Rik from the Young ones. He also seems to get off on baiting you. Just ignore. Your experience here won’t be worse for it.
You're concerned about someone baiting Leon ?
That's the ultimate in snowflakery.
Leon couldn't give a hoot about political criticism. It's only the personal stuff which occasionally riles him (as with all of us).
On Reform, one thing that nobody is taking into account that it's a One Man Band. Nobody is considering whether Farage has the health or energy for 4 years' slog until the next GE.
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
The really interesting thing is if he does collapse, to what extent do the Tories benefit? Expectations of their demise may be well short of the mark. That anger at Labour has to go somewhere.
Lib Dems?
I believe you might be underestimating the utter hatred for the Tories. They have dropped the ball.
If your USP is being competent (well, at least being more so than your rivals) and financially prudent, best not destroy your USP by electing a series of palpably incompetent and financially incontinent leaders, eh?
Farage is head and shoulders above everyone else as a political talent and there's a sense of inevitability about his march to Downing Street now.
It's not like the SPD period when Britain faced serious problems, but the person with the solutions was already in power. Starmer is no Thatcher and instead embodies everything that's gone wrong.
Completely inevitable. Do you fancy another £1,000 he doesn't?
Starmer is no Margaret Thatcher, Starmer is no Edward Heath - Heath had integrity. But Farage is no Margaret Thatcher or Edward Heath either.
So the wager sounds reasonable. We're both betting on losers. Let William and I send £1,000 each to PtP and we can get this show on the road.
"Let me and William"
They both work
No, because you and William are the OBJECT of the "Letting".
Hey Sunil,
Have you travelled on the new Metro rolling stock in Newcastle yet ?
I did on Tuesday. Neither impressed nor unimpressed.
No, not yet done the Class 555 (yes, they actually have a "mainline" class designation!), but thanks for the heads up! Was last in the Toon back in January to do the Ashington branch line. But my last ride on the Metro must have been back in October '23.
Having my pizza in the garden while the relentless Scottish sun beats down, not due to set to well after 9pm today - in early May already only a few minutes short of the latest sunset I will be getting in late June back on the island. It’s still hot enough that the dog is choosing to sit in the shade.
It continues to amaze that after such a tumultuous six political years, some PB’ers seem to think the wind is now set and nothing further of significance will change until the election a whole four long years hence.
My firm prediction is that there will be further, dramatic, currently unexpected significant change. Being currently unexpected, I don’t know what they will be.
We’ve got a pizza too. M&S. fennel and salami.
I had an ASDA Wensleydale Cheese, Petits Pois, and Red Pepper quiche for lunch. Wasn't half bad, actually
Just about to head out to pick up my take-away curry. Karahi Aloo Channa.
On Reform, one thing that nobody is taking into account that it's a One Man Band. Nobody is considering whether Farage has the health or energy for 4 years' slog until the next GE.
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
Likes a drink and a fag too.
Mind you I think he looks fitter than he used to recently, lost a bit of weight. I was amazed how trim he looked in celebrity jungle, whereas Starmer is a proper porker. I wouldn’t say he looked younger than Farage
So it turns out Find Out Now aren't dodgy, they are more like Find Out First
Pay attention to the ones they do/don’t caveat as they’ve added this caveat.
This poll was initiated solely by Find Out Now and not funded by any third party
Sorry, I am confused! Genuinely. Isn't this poll BMG?
After the election last week shy Reformers seem to have decided fash is fine.
Perhaps they have been replaced by shy Tories and Labourites.
"Fash"
Grow up. Do you honestly believe Reform under Nigel Farage are "fascist", or anything even close to it? Because they're not. Not at all. The comparison is juvenile and wanky and makes you sound like a 13 year old
If a proper actual Fascist party approaches power in the UK you will bloody well notice it, but you will have no words to describe the exceptional nature of this evolution, because you used them all up on Reform
The guys a complete spacker. Just ignore him. His politics is analogous to Rik from the Young ones. He also seems to get off on baiting you. Just ignore. Your experience here won’t be worse for it.
What is a spacker? Should I be offended or should I just ignore you as usual?
Having my pizza in the garden while the relentless Scottish sun beats down, not due to set to well after 9pm today - in early May already only a few minutes short of the latest sunset I will be getting in late June back on the island. It’s still hot enough that the dog is choosing to sit in the shade.
It continues to amaze that after such a tumultuous six political years, some PB’ers seem to think the wind is now set and nothing further of significance will change until the election a whole four long years hence.
My firm prediction is that there will be further, dramatic, currently unexpected significant change. Being currently unexpected, I don’t know what they will be.
We’ve got a pizza too. M&S. fennel and salami.
I had an ASDA Wensleydale Cheese, Petits Pois, and Red Pepper quiche for lunch. Wasn't half bad, actually
Just about to head out to pick up my take-away curry. Karahi Aloo Channa.
Edit:: Controversially, I am going to use cash!
Lamb Bhoona, Achari Chicken and South Indian Garlic Chicken in our house
So it turns out Find Out Now aren't dodgy, they are more like Find Out First
Pay attention to the ones they do/don’t caveat as they’ve added this caveat.
This poll was initiated solely by Find Out Now and not funded by any third party
Sorry, I am confused! Genuinely. Isn't this poll BMG?
After the election last week shy Reformers seem to have decided fash is fine.
Perhaps they have been replaced by shy Tories and Labourites.
"Fash"
Grow up. Do you honestly believe Reform under Nigel Farage are "fascist", or anything even close to it? Because they're not. Not at all. The comparison is juvenile and wanky and makes you sound like a 13 year old
If a proper actual Fascist party approaches power in the UK you will bloody well notice it, but you will have no words to describe the exceptional nature of this evolution, because you used them all up on Reform
The guys a complete spacker. Just ignore him. His politics is analogous to Rik from the Young ones. He also seems to get off on baiting you. Just ignore. Your experience here won’t be worse for it.
You're concerned about someone baiting Leon ?
That's the ultimate in snowflakery.
Leon couldn't give a hoot about political criticism. It's only the personal stuff which occasionally riles him (as with all of us).
I suspect he’s off carrying on with his AI ‘alcoholic girlfriend’ (a snip at just £20 a month) and not the least bit interested with what’s going down on PB right now?
The last one was a half baked scheme . And they’re trying to resurrect this as they desperately chase Reform voters and pensioners most of whom never did NS but think the youth of today aren’t up to much.
I think it depends entirely whether any of the men are William Shatner.
Didn't Kirk seriously wound the Gorn (though showed mercy and refused to kill) by constructing a gun out of bamboo like plants and home made gunpowder?
As I’ve been on the road to the Trossachs today, here’s a photo from sunny yesterday. A sad picture of a deserted settlement, its residents all having been driven away in the 19th century, so that their landlords could instead make money from sheep farming. Many of them went to Australia, and on the way back I was lucky enough to meet a bunch of Australians in search of where their family had originally come from.
No dog for scale; lifting him up onto the walls would have been gratuitous. He’s just below the photo, and you already know how big he is.
So it turns out Find Out Now aren't dodgy, they are more like Find Out First
Pay attention to the ones they do/don’t caveat as they’ve added this caveat.
This poll was initiated solely by Find Out Now and not funded by any third party
Sorry, I am confused! Genuinely. Isn't this poll BMG?
After the election last week shy Reformers seem to have decided fash is fine.
Perhaps they have been replaced by shy Tories and Labourites.
"Fash"
Grow up. Do you honestly believe Reform under Nigel Farage are "fascist", or anything even close to it? Because they're not. Not at all. The comparison is juvenile and wanky and makes you sound like a 13 year old
If a proper actual Fascist party approaches power in the UK you will bloody well notice it, but you will have no words to describe the exceptional nature of this evolution, because you used them all up on Reform
The guys a complete spacker. Just ignore him. His politics is analogous to Rik from the Young ones. He also seems to get off on baiting you. Just ignore. Your experience here won’t be worse for it.
You're concerned about someone baiting Leon ?
That's the ultimate in snowflakery.
Leon couldn't give a hoot about political criticism. It's only the personal stuff which occasionally riles him (as with all of us).
No shit, Sherlock. Any other pearls of wisdumb. Yeah, I’m gravely concerned. It stresses me greatly. I spend my every waking moment fretting about it. 😂😂😂
Comments
If care homes want staff, they could offer significantly more than minimum wage, then they would find many people who want to do the job - but why work cleaning people's bums for minimum wage when you could do something far less gross, for more money, by eg working minimum wage plus tips in hospitality?
Partly depends on the location. Easier if in a gorilla enclosure. Tougher if the situation is open ground. But gorillas need trees to nest in, so there's likely to be trees.
Say the gorilla is a BIG bastard - he still won't exceed 500 pound. Not quite 36 stone.
Let's say the men are 12 stone each - that is a total mass of men of 1,200 stone.
Firstly, surround the gorilla. Say 10 deep. The chaps facing the gorilla are going to get a hell of a beating. But maybe only the first three or four rows. The rest just pile in to crush the gorilla. Easier if there is a tree to push him against, easier still if a wall. Those at his back can soon pin his arms and legs. The weight of dead bloke bodies will also cause the gorilla to lose mobility and movement. Let's say he kills twenty guys - that is still 240 stone or well over one and a half tonnes pressing down on him. By now, the gorilla has the dead weight of a small car on his body, with four more cars crushing into him.
Even if nobody manages to get a choke hold on him, I suspect he would not last more than a minute before he is asphyxiated. 80 guys - some admittedly maimed - would then have to ensure that they were not crushing each other.
It would require a lot of teamwork, but sheer weight and numbers are too great for the gorilla to beat off.
Is it possible ? Sure.
Inevitable ? Nonsense.
Also, Farage has no solutions either.
“I tell myself I take one life, in order to save ten more.”
For the record, I'm not signing up for this.
I just don't think they're very good ones.
What do you think of the "Greenways"?
(I'm reviewing a draft of a piece looking at making the Greenways properly accessible as the start of an alternative off-road travel network for walking, wheeling, cycling. They seem to have quite a lot of anti-wheelchair barriers of various sorts.)
I'm happy to PM a link if anyone wants to comment.
Everyone pretends they have solutions.
In Reform's favour, it's possible (for example) that Green voters will make like the Michigan Palestinian voters, and refuse to vote tactically to keep them out.
Against that, someone like me might consider voting Labour for the first time in my life to do just that.
https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1920887571741090256
Do let us know how it goes with the change of strategy !
That is one hell of a man we have at number ten!
Care homes have not been enormously profitable businesses: Four Seasons Health was one of the largest care home providers in the UK, and went bust in 2019. They ran 322 home and had 22,000 staff. Before then, Southern Cross Healthcare, which was the largest provider in the UK, went bust.
"Sweden's national security adviser quits over Grindr images"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74nlgyv7r4o
If he's anything like Jack Reacher, the men are fecked.
Jeb: [chuckles] Are you kidding? It's five against one.
Jack Reacher: [shakes his head] It's *three* against one.
Jeb: [perplexed] *How* do you figure?
Jack Reacher: Well, once I take out the leader, which is you, I'll have to contend with one or two enthusiastic wingmen. The last two guys, they always run.
Would you be interested in commenting if I PM the link? It is at pre-final draft stage, so comments are helpful. I try to talk as widely as possible - attempts just to impose things are asking for pushback, where they may not actually be any real disagreement.
I mean it's not dissimilar to 25 year old Mike Tyson against a hundred 6 year olds
I passed him in the street the other day - still dapper, but he didn't look capable of taking on 100 Greens even.
Doesn't make "prepared to work for minimum wage" a special skill or qualification.
To import people as a "missing skill" when that "skill" is "prepared to work for minimum wage" makes a mockery of the whole system.
If wages go up, then authorities will just have to pay what they have to pay under service obligations, and the central government will have to adjust grants accordingly, and that will just have to be dealt with accordingly. Doesn't mean we need to import people prepared to work for minimum wage and call that a skill.
It has left a mystery which has seen me turning to questions like that posed in this survey. What kind of animal could, and would, have the means and motive to do this to a fully grown large ewe?
The options are:
- Dog - apparently labradors are the worst for sheep attacks, but they rarely actually eat them
- Wolf: wildwood wolf sanctuary isn’t far away but no reports of escapes
- Big cat: we’re a few miles from Howletts zoo, but again no reports
- Humans with a grudge: no evidence of clean knife wounds, but this was apparently the second time it’s happened and might they have taken it, got a dog to eat it, then put it back?
https://conservativehome.com/2025/05/06/this-ve-day-tory-mps-are-trying-to-introduce-national-service-again/
Doubt, as someone said, may be uncomfortable but certainty is absurd.
Satisfied-Dissatisfied
Farage 35-32 (+3)
Starmer 20-59 (-39)
Badenoch 20-25 (-5)
Davey 22-19 (+3)
I'm out for dinner, so I'll send an email later on.
So when the gloves are off I am sure it will be pointed out that the character who "embodies everything that has gone wrong" is Captain Chaos Farage.
Lush.
Have you travelled on the new Metro rolling stock in Newcastle yet ?
I did on Tuesday. Neither impressed nor unimpressed.
Which is correct?
"Let me send £1000 to PtP."
"Let I send £1000 to PtP."
Conservatives 12/1!
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.243393188
It continues to amaze that after such a tumultuous six political years, some PB’ers seem to think the wind is now set and nothing further of significance will change until the election a whole four long years hence.
My firm prediction is that there will be further, dramatic, currently unexpected significant change. Being currently unexpected, I don’t know what they will be.
That's a 7.5% return if they don't get a majority in 4 years time, less than 2% per annum, doesn't even meet inflation.
And in the extremely unlikely, but entirely possible, event that they do actually get a majority then you lose your stake, all to try to get a return below inflation.
Avoid.
I demand a statue. In Bristol.
The only thing that will get to him is when most people turn off when he appears on the TV.
This year, above average sunspot activity has allowed them to be seen way much further south than is usual.
But, despite periodic alerts from the aurora watch app, where I live, to the south of the highest point on the island, there’s no chance of my seeing them from home. Being able to grow olives and have wall lizards and bougainvillea in my garden is my only consolation.
During my Atlantic crossing last autumn, one of the days coincided with significant aurora activity, but I’d closed my cabin curtains and didn’t trouble to look out before bed. Next morning, the Internet was awash with dramatic photos taken from the ship.
Up here in Scotland, I’ve stayed in places with great open sky views to the north. But the sunspots have failed to deliver. Tonight, there’s a sign of a small buildup, but it wont be dark for a few hours yet. Will it deliver?
He is 61 but looks 5-10 years older than Starmer, who is actually 2 years his senior. PB was discussing the effect of ageing in our 50s/60s earlier; he himself has hinted that the impact of his air crash has taken its toll on his physical health. What happens if he isn't fit enough to continue? There must be a significant chance of this.
There is nobody else in Reform to take over (deliberately). How is the Pim Fortuyn List doing these days?
I believe you might be underestimating the utter hatred for the Tories. They have dropped the ball.
Labour if they get something right they could improve. Granted, with yesterday's disastrous capitulation (although duly noted only by Kemi and Dan Hodges) that is looking a long way off.
That's the ultimate in snowflakery.
Leon couldn't give a hoot about political criticism. It's only the personal stuff which occasionally riles him (as with all of us).
Edit:: Controversially, I am going to use cash!
Mind you I think he looks fitter than he used to recently, lost a bit of weight. I was amazed how trim he looked in celebrity jungle, whereas Starmer is a proper porker. I wouldn’t say he looked younger than Farage
The head of the Royal Navy has been suspended over claims he had an affair with a subordinate, sources have disclosed.
Admiral Sir Ben Key, 59, a married father of three, was told to “step back from all duties” while an investigation is carried out, it is understood.
It is the first time in the Royal Navy’s 500-year history that its first sea lord has faced a misconduct inquiry.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/head-royal-navy-suspended-affair-pfbm3m9jq
Tricky.
Therefore not unarmed.
residents all having been driven away in the 19th century, so that their landlords could instead make money from sheep farming. Many of them went to Australia, and on the way back I was lucky enough to meet a bunch of Australians in search of where their family had originally come from.
No dog for scale; lifting him up onto the walls would have been gratuitous. He’s just below the photo, and you already know how big he is.