Interesting anecdote from an otherwise totally apolitical reunion in Hereford yesterday.
(Hereford has had a weird recent history as our Herefordian travel writer has noted: the old town centre has been hollowed out by a new shopping mall in the old cattle market and looks desolate. But the other bits of town remain pretty and reasonably prosperous).
A lot of recent politics seems to be about frustration that despite promises by everyone to fix things, nothing happens. Right? Well speaking to people from North Herefordshire that’s precisely the reason the greens won the seat in 2024. Chicken farmers have been dumping organic waste close to the Wye for years, and the river and groundwater are eutrophic and blighted. What used to be a clear, swimmable river brimming with salmon and trout is dead.
But nothing has been done. The previous Tory MP was an ex farmer and never made a concerted effort to get it fixed. The Green vote was a vote of frustration. Pretty much a single issue election.
I was aware of the long running issue but the whole “and nobody did anything despite years of campaigning” was interesting.
I was impressed to find that when I arrived by train in Hereford a couple of months ago there was a free electric bus taking people into the town centre. Haven't encountered that anywhere else so far.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
It's Sunday morning and I'm in a reasonable mood so I'm going to be charitable to the Conservative Party (frame this, it doesn't happen often).
Putting the whole EU business to one side (not easy but the ramifications of departure have been overstated by both sides), it wasn't easy being in Government at the start of the 2020s.
You had the biggest public health emergency since WW2 and the outbreak of armed conflict in or near Europe - each on their own was destabilising, both together were and have been disastrous.
We can, have and no doubt will again debate the UK Government to COVID but the point was the Government put health before wealth - the economy was basically closed down for three months (the PMI graph is frightening) to protect people from the virus. I don't want to debate the rights and wrongs of that - it happened. The consequences of the dislocation were both immediate and longer lasting, indeed, well after the vaccine had been rolled out and the immediate threat ended.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine which, far from being the swift decisive action Putin and Moscow might have hoped, has turned into a bloody war of attrition more like WW1 than what we think of as modern warfare.
The big problem was when the pent up demand was released - people who had spent little or nothing for months and had accumulated cash reserves wanted to spend but the struggling global supply chains meant many things were in short supply - the result, inflation. It was that which killed Governments world wide, the fact of big price rises making everyone feel worse off.
Governments took the blame and felt the anger - after 14 years leading the Government, the UK Conservatives had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In many ways, it did for them as the 2008 crisis had done for Governments then.
Traditional politics of what you might call "the centre" has been discredited twice and it's understandable people look elsewhere - if you want to call it nationalist, socially conservative, anti-immigrant, populist or whatever, parties like Reform, VOX, Chega, BSW and others have emerged.
I think the reason that the COVID response led to disillusionment with the centre & with liberal/intellectual elites in certain countries, but not others could be differences in COVID death rates.
Both the UK & the US had relatively high COVID death rates. The UK death rate was 3404 per million and the US one was 3493 per million. Both countries are now experiencing a rise of populist movements.
Conversely, Australia had a very low death rate of 963 per million, while Canada's was 1424 per million. In both Canada and Australia, there hasn't been any significant populist movement, and the centre has retained broad political support.
I think it's possible that the high death rates in the UK & USA led to a perception that COVID restrictions were imposed by the "elites" but that these policies "failed" because there was still a large number of deaths.
In Australia & Canada, there is a perhaps a different perception that the restrictions were worth it, in terms of saving lots of lives, and therefore that the "elites" are competent & know what they are doing.
Correlation is not causation. And, besides, there are many counter examples
Rightwing populism is driven by many things. Top of a long list is mass migration. Covid response might be in the list but it’s not top 10
The problem with "its migration" is of course what happens as and when mass migration stops.
There is a veneer or "too many people who look and sound different" but at its heart the migration push back is economic.
The challenge for a supposed Reform government is that if there is an abrupt freeze in migration, the economy gets worse, not better. Which is the exact opposite of what punters expect.
The real challenge for a possible Reform government is that they have no coherent program. Like Brexit, they've various headlines which appeal to the electorate, some very strongly, but actually implementing them will be impossible.
There's a democratic fallacy that just because a majority vote for something, then it can be implemented in a manner which satisfies those who voted for it.
This. I don't see anything that tells me a Reform government won't be just like another Boris one.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
More sadly, I think it goes even deeper.
May didn't deliver either, and wouldn't have done so even with a majority, and some of the problems we face today date back to remarkably superficial and cynical political decisions taken under the Coalition.
I think the Conservatives broke their wick in the 1990s, and never got it back.
I agree, but would position it slightly differently.
Growing up with parents who were Tory members, it always struck me that their self image was essentially of being sensible, non-political people - indeed if I ever tried to argue with them, it was usually only minutes before any challenge was dismissed with one of the many variants of "why bring politics into it?" (or that "Labour would only make things worse" - which amounts to the same thing).
Their view of the wider left was that it was driven by ideology and politics whereas conservatives were sensible people who stuck to what worked and weren't driven by ideology. So any left-wing idea was "politics" and any conservative idea was simply practical common sense!
In the 1990s - as you say - that started to change with Thatcher, with the wets v drys and the emergence of policy driven by ideology on the right. To begin with, the new government was pragmatic in that, taking the wider view, the changes being made, if sometimes radical, were both necessary and broadly worked, at least in the medium term (the longer term fallout we still suffer today). And political historians remind us that the early 90s governments were more pragmatic and flexible than they now seem viewed through the prism of their downfall. Early Thatcher was also broadly pro-EEC, as an economic arrangement that was delivering for the UK.
Things started to go off the rails during late Thatcher, with the rise of ideological anti-Europeanism and other policy changes driven by ideology - culminating with the poll tax.
Major did his best to restore pragmatic conservatism - and pulled off a big win on the back of it - and Cameron eventually made it back into power with a modernised version of the same, after flirting with ideology during the long years of opposition got the Tories precisely nowhere. But they never took on the UKIP tendency eating away from below within their own ranks, and Cameron's cunning plan to see them off backfired badly.
The frothing about any agreements with the EU that we saw from the Tory spokesman on this morning's LK simply illustrates that the Tories are as yet neither near nor heading towards Reality Checkpoint.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Many of their problems predate that.
for example the increase in student fees crippled them among young graduates.
Something which was accentuated by unaffordable housing in southern England.
The Conservatives became reliant upon the support of the over 50s and C2s.
Demographics which Farage could be attractive to.
The Conservatives ceased to be aspirational. Especially for younger people.
If Cameron was serious that we were "all in it together" he should have announced the triple lock would move to a double lock by 2025 (in 15 years time from 2010) which would now be taking effect, and lower stamp duty and incentivised downsizing.
My parents have literally just rejected doing this due to cost, and losing c.£80k in so doing, so are now living in a house that's far too big for them.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Since the Boriswave didn't lead to any magic economic boost, especially not in GDP per head, I think we can discount this too.
The Boriswave may turn out to be the single most consequential act by a British government in a generation. Two generations. Bigger than Brexit
Because not only has it - apparently - killed the Tories it may also have scuppered Labour and instead propelled a populist right wing party into the lead
Like a kind of political atom bomb with unpredictable fallout
What were they thinking?!
Nothing. They weren't.
It was clear after Boris won in Dec 2019, that he intended to do absolutely fuck all in office except make speeches and bonk Carrie.
The only real success he had was the Brexit deal, where I think Frost actually did a good job.
Some PBer (apologies, forget who) posited the theory that they knowingly allowed the Boriswave because they were scared care/NHS etc would collapse after Brexit and the ending of FOM
It’s not a great theory but at least it’s a theory. There aren’t many
I’ve also heard it argued that some Brexiteers are secret Open Borders types. They genuinely believe in this lunacy. If so they should be REDACTED
Otherwise we are left with simple but grotesque incompetence
It's not a secret. I had a drink with Dan Hannan at a Vote Leave event shortly before the vote, and he essentially said this to my face. And then told me George Osborne told him he, personally, favoured the euro.
Dunno about Hannan. Very bright bloke but when Starmer did the Indian deal he seemed genuinely mystified by the angry reaction re visas and NIC
Which is frankly stupid. It’s obvious British voters are angry about immigration and deeply allergic to the idea of more. Even Starmer gets this
Maybe Hannan is an example of that curious phenomenon, the very clever person who is bizarrely thick on certain issues
Tbf, he didn't say he believed in open borders - but he did say he had no real issue with free movement, and that wasn't the vote was about for him.
Well that’s very different. And I agree with him
I kinda know Dan and I’m pleased to hear he’s not an idiot. I too had no real problems with FoM (but I respect those who do - I’m not a plumber)
My beef with the EU was and is sovereignty and democracy
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Rishi Sunak might go down in history as the last Conservative Prime Minister, not the first Asian one.
Nah, we all thought Major would be the last Tory PM back in 1997.
It's possible the Conservatives come back, like Lazarus, in the late 2030s following a failed Reform experiment, a bit like how Trudeau did.
But, knowing them, they'll sit tight and wait for the cards to fall in their lap, rather than do anything active to bring it about, and then simply repeat the same behaviour in office again.
I have no confidence in their ability to deliver for their base or deliver good governance for the country anymore.
Scenes outside Goodison. Team bus unable to get through the blue smoke and the folk. Wish I were there. But. It isn't going anywhere. So I can again. And. When folk say we don't build anything nice outside London, have a trip to Bramley Moore dock. It's beautiful. Well worth losing World Heritage status for. It wasn't done on the cheap. Nor to maximise every last penny. But with love. Maybe there's a lesson? UTFT!!
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Many of their problems predate that.
for example the increase in student fees crippled them among young graduates.
Something which was accentuated by unaffordable housing in southern England.
The Conservatives became reliant upon the support of the over 50s and C2s.
Demographics which Farage could be attractive to.
Much of that vote, white van man, taxi driver, golf club bore, only voted Conservative because there was no realistic alternative further to the right. Not they have that alternative.
I'd phrase that slightly differently. There was no realistic alternative which wasn't to the left. They don't necessarily want it to be more right wing. Just a lot less hedge Fundy.
Thinking about that demographic, they are self employed or small business owners, who want more control over their lives, hence self employed, and less control by government. Traditional old school Conservatives.
That probably goes back to Thatcher. I can't remember who came up with the line that she sought to create a memorial to her father but built a playground for her son, but that was the beginning of the end for that sort of municipal Tory.
They could be maddening, as they spluttered into their G and Ts about single mothers or penpushers. They also had a curious blind spot, hating regulation except when it protected their business. But they did have real businesses doing real things, and connections with the communities they served.
Trouble is that they are much less common than they used to be, because those sorts of businesses are. And the Conservatives are much more interested in tickling hedgies, because that's where the money is. One of the understandable strands in Reform at grass roots level is a wish to go back to those older times. Shame it's mixed in with so much toxic fantasising.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Subcontinent rather than East Asia ? But otherwise, rather more foresight than those who remain astonished and dismayed by the 'Boriswave' that their votes enabled.
Yes. Thank god the Boriswave came mainly from Japan
Reform / AFD electoral comparison - not ideological.
Reform are now running 10 Councils, and are largest party in NOC councils elsewhere.
AFD did reasonably well (meaning big improvement but not as much as thought possible) at the recent German Election.
Had the AFD run any important Councils before? Did the Electorate have any indication whether they were competent?
Reform outperformed in their strongest areas (Kent, Lincolnshire) compared to the AFD on Thuringia. Also the electoral system helped Reform here for councils compared to Germany's landtag
TBF also, the Councils here were a top slice of likely Reform areas - not all likely Reform areas, but a concentration of them.
Amond the councils whose elections were postponed were Thurrock, Suffolk and Norfolk where I imagine Reform might have won some seats.
The other councils were, from memory, Hampshire, Surrey, East and West Sussex, the Isle of Wight and the other one. Based on what we saw elsewhere, it's not hard to imagine big Conservative losses to the LDs, Reform and Greens in those councils. Indeed, you can argue Badenoch can thank Angela Rayner for not making a disastrous result catastrophic and potentially job-threatening.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Since the Boriswave didn't lead to any magic economic boost, especially not in GDP per head, I think we can discount this too.
Boris always said that he was pro-immigration. Patel advocated for Brexit saying that Brexit would mean the UK could liberalise migration from the sub-continent.
Boris and Patel took Brexit's freedoms and liberated migration from the sub-continent exactly as they said they would do.
There's no grand conspiracy. They said what they believed in and what they were going to do. It was Ronseal politics.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
@Dura_Ace ”Ridden like Mountbatten’s aide de camp” is nautical language, I imagine.
Given his vanity, love of uniforms, and high fashion, the fact Mountbatten managed to bury himself so deep in the closet is a historical wonder.
Don’t think it was buried that deeply (ooer!), I had it on good authority that he was known as Lord Mountbottom in the royal household. That was in the good old days when it didn’t matter what royals & assorted hangers-on did as long as the oiks didn’t get to know about it.
And why should it matter what his personal preferences were? If his wife tolerated it why is it of any significance to anyone else?
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Rishi Sunak might go down in history as the last Conservative Prime Minister, not the first Asian one.
Nah, we all thought Major would be the last Tory PM back in 1997.
It's possible the Conservatives come back, like Lazarus, in the late 2030s following a failed Reform experiment, a bit like how Trudeau did.
But, knowing them, they'll sit tight and wait for the cards to fall in their lap, rather than do anything active to bring it about, and then simply repeat the same behaviour in office again.
I have no confidence in their ability to deliver for their base or deliver good governance for the country anymore.
Therein lies my point. Much of it isn't a great love for Farage and his ideals. But a nostalgia for competence on the right.
I think if he ran as a Labour candidate, he'd win easily.
Not sure his temperament will stand up well to any scurrility. His behaviour got him kicked back across the pond as the Americans don't want him any more.
I know there are many Lib Dems on here and would urge you to read Andrew Pierce piece on Ed Davey in today's Mail on Sunday
A very interesting and quite emotional article that provides a lot of information on Ed Davey and his family's serious and devastating health issues and how he copes
It certainly explains why he is so committed to the cause of carers and his extraordinary struggles
Interesting anecdote from an otherwise totally apolitical reunion in Hereford yesterday.
(Hereford has had a weird recent history as our Herefordian travel writer has noted: the old town centre has been hollowed out by a new shopping mall in the old cattle market and looks desolate. But the other bits of town remain pretty and reasonably prosperous).
A lot of recent politics seems to be about frustration that despite promises by everyone to fix things, nothing happens. Right? Well speaking to people from North Herefordshire that’s precisely the reason the greens won the seat in 2024. Chicken farmers have been dumping organic waste close to the Wye for years, and the river and groundwater are eutrophic and blighted. What used to be a clear, swimmable river brimming with salmon and trout is dead.
But nothing has been done. The previous Tory MP was an ex farmer and never made a concerted effort to get it fixed. The Green vote was a vote of frustration. Pretty much a single issue election.
I was aware of the long running issue but the whole “and nobody did anything despite years of campaigning” was interesting.
Quite sad to hear the town centre is still knackered
And yes indeed on the Wye. An utter disgrace. The chicken farmers should go to jail. I could sense the local anger in 2023 and it was obvious the Tories were in deep trouble
I really do hope the Tories die. They’ve had their time. Enough
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Subcontinent rather than East Asia ? But otherwise, rather more foresight than those who remain astonished and dismayed by the 'Boriswave' that their votes enabled.
Is Boris right about the ‘Boriswave’?
Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday [in March 2025] and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing? https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-boris-right-about-the-boriswave/
The Spectator fisks Boris's claim that the Boriswave was nothing to do with him, honest, a big boy did it and ran away.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
It's Sunday morning and I'm in a reasonable mood so I'm going to be charitable to the Conservative Party (frame this, it doesn't happen often).
Putting the whole EU business to one side (not easy but the ramifications of departure have been overstated by both sides), it wasn't easy being in Government at the start of the 2020s.
You had the biggest public health emergency since WW2 and the outbreak of armed conflict in or near Europe - each on their own was destabilising, both together were and have been disastrous.
We can, have and no doubt will again debate the UK Government to COVID but the point was the Government put health before wealth - the economy was basically closed down for three months (the PMI graph is frightening) to protect people from the virus. I don't want to debate the rights and wrongs of that - it happened. The consequences of the dislocation were both immediate and longer lasting, indeed, well after the vaccine had been rolled out and the immediate threat ended.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine which, far from being the swift decisive action Putin and Moscow might have hoped, has turned into a bloody war of attrition more like WW1 than what we think of as modern warfare.
The big problem was when the pent up demand was released - people who had spent little or nothing for months and had accumulated cash reserves wanted to spend but the struggling global supply chains meant many things were in short supply - the result, inflation. It was that which killed Governments world wide, the fact of big price rises making everyone feel worse off.
Governments took the blame and felt the anger - after 14 years leading the Government, the UK Conservatives had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In many ways, it did for them as the 2008 crisis had done for Governments then.
Traditional politics of what you might call "the centre" has been discredited twice and it's understandable people look elsewhere - if you want to call it nationalist, socially conservative, anti-immigrant, populist or whatever, parties like Reform, VOX, Chega, BSW and others have emerged.
I think the reason that the COVID response led to disillusionment with the centre & with liberal/intellectual elites in certain countries, but not others could be differences in COVID death rates.
Both the UK & the US had relatively high COVID death rates. The UK death rate was 3404 per million and the US one was 3493 per million. Both countries are now experiencing a rise of populist movements.
Conversely, Australia had a very low death rate of 963 per million, while Canada's was 1424 per million. In both Canada and Australia, there hasn't been any significant populist movement, and the centre has retained broad political support.
I think it's possible that the high death rates in the UK & USA led to a perception that COVID restrictions were imposed by the "elites" but that these policies "failed" because there was still a large number of deaths.
In Australia & Canada, there is a perhaps a different perception that the restrictions were worth it, in terms of saving lots of lives, and therefore that the "elites" are competent & know what they are doing.
Correlation is not causation. And, besides, there are many counter examples
Rightwing populism is driven by many things. Top of a long list is mass migration. Covid response might be in the list but it’s not top 10
The problem with "its migration" is of course what happens as and when mass migration stops.
There is a veneer or "too many people who look and sound different" but at its heart the migration push back is economic.
The challenge for a supposed Reform government is that if there is an abrupt freeze in migration, the economy gets worse, not better. Which is the exact opposite of what punters expect.
The real challenge for a possible Reform government is that they have no coherent program. Like Brexit, they've various headlines which appeal to the electorate, some very strongly, but actually implementing them will be impossible.
There's a democratic fallacy that just because a majority vote for something, then it can be implemented in a manner which satisfies those who voted for it.
This. I don't see anything that tells me a Reform government won't be just like another Boris one.
That's one of the more optimistic outlooks. What Reform have said about tax and spend puts them on track for a repeat of Truss, except without the Men in Grey Suits to stage an intervention.
@Dura_Ace ”Ridden like Mountbatten’s aide de camp” is nautical language, I imagine.
Given his vanity, love of uniforms, and high fashion, the fact Mountbatten managed to bury himself so deep in the closet is a historical wonder.
Don’t think it was buried that deeply (ooer!), I had it on good authority that he was known as Lord Mountbottom in the royal household. That was in the good old days when it didn’t matter what royals & assorted hangers-on did as long as the oiks didn’t get to know about it.
And why should it matter what his personal preferences were? If his wife tolerated it why is it of any significance to anyone else?
Because there are grave and ongoing allegations against him? This is from two days ago
“‘I was raped by Mountbatten in Kincora at age 11; he wasn’t a lord… to me he was king of the paedophiles’
Veteran journalist Chris Moore interviewed three victims of the senior royal killed by the IRA in 1979 for his new book on ‘the most enduring child sex scandal in the history of the UK’. He says the story won’t go away despite a huge Establishment cover-up”
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Subcontinent rather than East Asia ? But otherwise, rather more foresight than those who remain astonished and dismayed by the 'Boriswave' that their votes enabled.
Is Boris right about the ‘Boriswave’?
Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday [in March 2025] and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing? https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-boris-right-about-the-boriswave/
The Spectator fisks Boris's claim that the Boriswave was nothing to do with him, honest, a big boy did it and ran away.
A considerable chunk of the Boriswave was “care” visas (and dependents) via care companies.
See our recent discussions on the rampant fraud, abuse and the whole scheme being shut down.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
It's Sunday morning and I'm in a reasonable mood so I'm going to be charitable to the Conservative Party (frame this, it doesn't happen often).
Putting the whole EU business to one side (not easy but the ramifications of departure have been overstated by both sides), it wasn't easy being in Government at the start of the 2020s.
You had the biggest public health emergency since WW2 and the outbreak of armed conflict in or near Europe - each on their own was destabilising, both together were and have been disastrous.
We can, have and no doubt will again debate the UK Government to COVID but the point was the Government put health before wealth - the economy was basically closed down for three months (the PMI graph is frightening) to protect people from the virus. I don't want to debate the rights and wrongs of that - it happened. The consequences of the dislocation were both immediate and longer lasting, indeed, well after the vaccine had been rolled out and the immediate threat ended.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine which, far from being the swift decisive action Putin and Moscow might have hoped, has turned into a bloody war of attrition more like WW1 than what we think of as modern warfare.
The big problem was when the pent up demand was released - people who had spent little or nothing for months and had accumulated cash reserves wanted to spend but the struggling global supply chains meant many things were in short supply - the result, inflation. It was that which killed Governments world wide, the fact of big price rises making everyone feel worse off.
Governments took the blame and felt the anger - after 14 years leading the Government, the UK Conservatives had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In many ways, it did for them as the 2008 crisis had done for Governments then.
Traditional politics of what you might call "the centre" has been discredited twice and it's understandable people look elsewhere - if you want to call it nationalist, socially conservative, anti-immigrant, populist or whatever, parties like Reform, VOX, Chega, BSW and others have emerged.
I think the reason that the COVID response led to disillusionment with the centre & with liberal/intellectual elites in certain countries, but not others could be differences in COVID death rates.
Both the UK & the US had relatively high COVID death rates. The UK death rate was 3404 per million and the US one was 3493 per million. Both countries are now experiencing a rise of populist movements.
Conversely, Australia had a very low death rate of 963 per million, while Canada's was 1424 per million. In both Canada and Australia, there hasn't been any significant populist movement, and the centre has retained broad political support.
I think it's possible that the high death rates in the UK & USA led to a perception that COVID restrictions were imposed by the "elites" but that these policies "failed" because there was still a large number of deaths.
In Australia & Canada, there is a perhaps a different perception that the restrictions were worth it, in terms of saving lots of lives, and therefore that the "elites" are competent & know what they are doing.
Correlation is not causation. And, besides, there are many counter examples
Rightwing populism is driven by many things. Top of a long list is mass migration. Covid response might be in the list but it’s not top 10
The problem with "its migration" is of course what happens as and when mass migration stops.
There is a veneer or "too many people who look and sound different" but at its heart the migration push back is economic.
The challenge for a supposed Reform government is that if there is an abrupt freeze in migration, the economy gets worse, not better. Which is the exact opposite of what punters expect.
The real challenge for a possible Reform government is that they have no coherent program. Like Brexit, they've various headlines which appeal to the electorate, some very strongly, but actually implementing them will be impossible.
There's a democratic fallacy that just because a majority vote for something, then it can be implemented in a manner which satisfies those who voted for it.
This. I don't see anything that tells me a Reform government won't be just like another Boris one.
That's one of the more optimistic outlooks. What Reform have said about tax and spend puts them on track for a repeat of Truss, except without the Men in Grey Suits to stage an intervention.
@Dura_Ace ”Ridden like Mountbatten’s aide de camp” is nautical language, I imagine.
Given his vanity, love of uniforms, and high fashion, the fact Mountbatten managed to bury himself so deep in the closet is a historical wonder.
Don’t think it was buried that deeply (ooer!), I had it on good authority that he was known as Lord Mountbottom in the royal household. That was in the good old days when it didn’t matter what royals & assorted hangers-on did as long as the oiks didn’t get to know about it.
And why should it matter what his personal preferences were? If his wife tolerated it why is it of any significance to anyone else?
Apart from the oiks being plastered on the front page of the News of the World and getting criminal records for their 'personal preferences', yep, doesn't matter at all.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Subcontinent rather than East Asia ? But otherwise, rather more foresight than those who remain astonished and dismayed by the 'Boriswave' that their votes enabled.
Is Boris right about the ‘Boriswave’?
Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday [in March 2025] and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing? https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-boris-right-about-the-boriswave/
The Spectator fisks Boris's claim that the Boriswave was nothing to do with him, honest, a big boy did it and ran away.
A considerable chunk of the Boriswave was “care” visas (and dependents) via care companies.
See our recent discussions on the rampant fraud, abuse and the whole scheme being shut down.
A bigger chunk of the wave was "care" dependencies.
Even if they were all working in care, which they're not, bringing in more dependents than workers when the workers are unskilled minimum wage employees is utter economic madness.
Raising pay would have been a far better solution. Its amazing how many people on the left hate the concept of some people getting paid more than minimum wage.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
It's Sunday morning and I'm in a reasonable mood so I'm going to be charitable to the Conservative Party (frame this, it doesn't happen often).
Putting the whole EU business to one side (not easy but the ramifications of departure have been overstated by both sides), it wasn't easy being in Government at the start of the 2020s.
You had the biggest public health emergency since WW2 and the outbreak of armed conflict in or near Europe - each on their own was destabilising, both together were and have been disastrous.
We can, have and no doubt will again debate the UK Government to COVID but the point was the Government put health before wealth - the economy was basically closed down for three months (the PMI graph is frightening) to protect people from the virus. I don't want to debate the rights and wrongs of that - it happened. The consequences of the dislocation were both immediate and longer lasting, indeed, well after the vaccine had been rolled out and the immediate threat ended.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine which, far from being the swift decisive action Putin and Moscow might have hoped, has turned into a bloody war of attrition more like WW1 than what we think of as modern warfare.
The big problem was when the pent up demand was released - people who had spent little or nothing for months and had accumulated cash reserves wanted to spend but the struggling global supply chains meant many things were in short supply - the result, inflation. It was that which killed Governments world wide, the fact of big price rises making everyone feel worse off.
Governments took the blame and felt the anger - after 14 years leading the Government, the UK Conservatives had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In many ways, it did for them as the 2008 crisis had done for Governments then.
Traditional politics of what you might call "the centre" has been discredited twice and it's understandable people look elsewhere - if you want to call it nationalist, socially conservative, anti-immigrant, populist or whatever, parties like Reform, VOX, Chega, BSW and others have emerged.
I think the reason that the COVID response led to disillusionment with the centre & with liberal/intellectual elites in certain countries, but not others could be differences in COVID death rates.
Both the UK & the US had relatively high COVID death rates. The UK death rate was 3404 per million and the US one was 3493 per million. Both countries are now experiencing a rise of populist movements.
Conversely, Australia had a very low death rate of 963 per million, while Canada's was 1424 per million. In both Canada and Australia, there hasn't been any significant populist movement, and the centre has retained broad political support.
I think it's possible that the high death rates in the UK & USA led to a perception that COVID restrictions were imposed by the "elites" but that these policies "failed" because there was still a large number of deaths.
In Australia & Canada, there is a perhaps a different perception that the restrictions were worth it, in terms of saving lots of lives, and therefore that the "elites" are competent & know what they are doing.
Correlation is not causation. And, besides, there are many counter examples
Rightwing populism is driven by many things. Top of a long list is mass migration. Covid response might be in the list but it’s not top 10
The problem with "its migration" is of course what happens as and when mass migration stops.
There is a veneer or "too many people who look and sound different" but at its heart the migration push back is economic.
The challenge for a supposed Reform government is that if there is an abrupt freeze in migration, the economy gets worse, not better. Which is the exact opposite of what punters expect.
The real challenge for a possible Reform government is that they have no coherent program. Like Brexit, they've various headlines which appeal to the electorate, some very strongly, but actually implementing them will be impossible.
There's a democratic fallacy that just because a majority vote for something, then it can be implemented in a manner which satisfies those who voted for it.
This. I don't see anything that tells me a Reform government won't be just like another Boris one.
That's one of the more optimistic outlooks. What Reform have said about tax and spend puts them on track for a repeat of Truss, except without the Men in Grey Suits to stage an intervention.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Rishi Sunak might go down in history as the last Conservative Prime Minister, not the first Asian one.
Nah, we all thought Major would be the last Tory PM back in 1997.
It's possible the Conservatives come back, like Lazarus, in the late 2030s following a failed Reform experiment, a bit like how Trudeau did.
But, knowing them, they'll sit tight and wait for the cards to fall in their lap, rather than do anything active to bring it about, and then simply repeat the same behaviour in office again.
I have no confidence in their ability to deliver for their base or deliver good governance for the country anymore.
Therein lies my point. Much of it isn't a great love for Farage and his ideals. But a nostalgia for competence on the right.
And yet Reform like parties across Europe are made to walk the walk by the electorate that they are moderate enough, competent enough, before they get close.
Le Pen - moderate yourself decade after decade, AfD - oh look a CDU revival even after the Merkelwave, Lega - you were always the madmen not the pragmatists of the Italian new right, let's have the proven pragmatists.
The Tories have trashed their brand quite a lot on basic competence, but they still have the organisation and knowledge to outflank Reform on that, even if they decide to be new right.
When I was in Hereford recently I didn't particularly notice that the town centre was in a bad state, I was just enjoying the fact that it's a wonderfully spacious town centre compared to most English towns.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
There are some real inconsistencies in that though, such as the exemption for milk-based drinks which mean that many milk-based drinks are full of sugar.
As someone who avoids sugar/carbs, it pisses me off that all bottled coffee-based drinks are full of sugar.
There are naturally no carbs in coffee and milk is naturally minimal in it too, but there's no sugar-free low-carb coffee based bottled drinks ever available in the supermarket.
I dislike the nanny state in principle, but being selfish I hate the lack of sugar-free coffee-based drinks when I'm out and about and the need to go for some Monster or something similar if I want a caffeine drink that's sugar free rather than coffee.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Subcontinent rather than East Asia ? But otherwise, rather more foresight than those who remain astonished and dismayed by the 'Boriswave' that their votes enabled.
Is Boris right about the ‘Boriswave’?
Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday [in March 2025] and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing? https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-boris-right-about-the-boriswave/
The Spectator fisks Boris's claim that the Boriswave was nothing to do with him, honest, a big boy did it and ran away.
So. I was too lazy to enquire about the details. Therefore it isn't my fault. That'll go on the Johnson epitaph.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily. So consumers are consuming less sugar from their food without any idea or via the idea that taxation is nudging them away from full sugar coke to sugar free sparkling water.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Subcontinent rather than East Asia ? But otherwise, rather more foresight than those who remain astonished and dismayed by the 'Boriswave' that their votes enabled.
Is Boris right about the ‘Boriswave’?
Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday [in March 2025] and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing? https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-boris-right-about-the-boriswave/
The Spectator fisks Boris's claim that the Boriswave was nothing to do with him, honest, a big boy did it and ran away.
A considerable chunk of the Boriswave was “care” visas (and dependents) via care companies.
See our recent discussions on the rampant fraud, abuse and the whole scheme being shut down.
Indeed, and see the article I linked to which mentions and graphs care workers and their dependents, although not fraud. And Boris was running the shop.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
It's Sunday morning and I'm in a reasonable mood so I'm going to be charitable to the Conservative Party (frame this, it doesn't happen often).
Putting the whole EU business to one side (not easy but the ramifications of departure have been overstated by both sides), it wasn't easy being in Government at the start of the 2020s.
You had the biggest public health emergency since WW2 and the outbreak of armed conflict in or near Europe - each on their own was destabilising, both together were and have been disastrous.
We can, have and no doubt will again debate the UK Government to COVID but the point was the Government put health before wealth - the economy was basically closed down for three months (the PMI graph is frightening) to protect people from the virus. I don't want to debate the rights and wrongs of that - it happened. The consequences of the dislocation were both immediate and longer lasting, indeed, well after the vaccine had been rolled out and the immediate threat ended.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine which, far from being the swift decisive action Putin and Moscow might have hoped, has turned into a bloody war of attrition more like WW1 than what we think of as modern warfare.
The big problem was when the pent up demand was released - people who had spent little or nothing for months and had accumulated cash reserves wanted to spend but the struggling global supply chains meant many things were in short supply - the result, inflation. It was that which killed Governments world wide, the fact of big price rises making everyone feel worse off.
Governments took the blame and felt the anger - after 14 years leading the Government, the UK Conservatives had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In many ways, it did for them as the 2008 crisis had done for Governments then.
Traditional politics of what you might call "the centre" has been discredited twice and it's understandable people look elsewhere - if you want to call it nationalist, socially conservative, anti-immigrant, populist or whatever, parties like Reform, VOX, Chega, BSW and others have emerged.
I think the reason that the COVID response led to disillusionment with the centre & with liberal/intellectual elites in certain countries, but not others could be differences in COVID death rates.
Both the UK & the US had relatively high COVID death rates. The UK death rate was 3404 per million and the US one was 3493 per million. Both countries are now experiencing a rise of populist movements.
Conversely, Australia had a very low death rate of 963 per million, while Canada's was 1424 per million. In both Canada and Australia, there hasn't been any significant populist movement, and the centre has retained broad political support.
I think it's possible that the high death rates in the UK & USA led to a perception that COVID restrictions were imposed by the "elites" but that these policies "failed" because there was still a large number of deaths.
In Australia & Canada, there is a perhaps a different perception that the restrictions were worth it, in terms of saving lots of lives, and therefore that the "elites" are competent & know what they are doing.
Correlation is not causation. And, besides, there are many counter examples
Rightwing populism is driven by many things. Top of a long list is mass migration. Covid response might be in the list but it’s not top 10
The problem with "its migration" is of course what happens as and when mass migration stops.
There is a veneer or "too many people who look and sound different" but at its heart the migration push back is economic.
The challenge for a supposed Reform government is that if there is an abrupt freeze in migration, the economy gets worse, not better. Which is the exact opposite of what punters expect.
The real challenge for a possible Reform government is that they have no coherent program. Like Brexit, they've various headlines which appeal to the electorate, some very strongly, but actually implementing them will be impossible.
There's a democratic fallacy that just because a majority vote for something, then it can be implemented in a manner which satisfies those who voted for it.
This. I don't see anything that tells me a Reform government won't be just like another Boris one.
That's one of the more optimistic outlooks. What Reform have said about tax and spend puts them on track for a repeat of Truss, except without the Men in Grey Suits to stage an intervention.
Economics is their achilles heel, not "Farage" or trying to throw the R-word at them.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Since the Boriswave didn't lead to any magic economic boost, especially not in GDP per head, I think we can discount this too.
Boris always said that he was pro-immigration. Patel advocated for Brexit saying that Brexit would mean the UK could liberalise migration from the sub-continent.
Boris and Patel took Brexit's freedoms and liberated migration from the sub-continent exactly as they said they would do.
There's no grand conspiracy. They said what they believed in and what they were going to do. It was Ronseal politics.
I agree.
Johnson even used the term "our friends " from the Indian subcontinent. Those of you bemoaning recent immigration from the Indian subcontinent were promised that it would be a positive outcome from Brexit, as we turfed out the Eastern Europeans that we didn't like, but needed others to fulfil their job roles. We got exactly what Johnson promised us. For once he told us the truth.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
If a Youth Mobility Scheme is announced as part of this weeks deal with the EU, I think it would be a mistake for Farage to completely oppose it. I would suggest the upper age limit (30?) be reduced to 23, 25 at a push.
Badenoch made a decent go at explaining why this matters; no one minds an 18-23 year old French kid working in a bar on their gap year, but the danger is we will get a load of 29 year old unemployed Romanians turning up. Late 20s is not "youth", I'd say 25 was a bit old for a youth scheme
But Farage should welcome the 18-23 year old aspect of it, you don't want to be seen as a fun sponge
@Dura_Ace ”Ridden like Mountbatten’s aide de camp” is nautical language, I imagine.
Given his vanity, love of uniforms, and high fashion, the fact Mountbatten managed to bury himself so deep in the closet is a historical wonder.
Don’t think it was buried that deeply (ooer!), I had it on good authority that he was known as Lord Mountbottom in the royal household. That was in the good old days when it didn’t matter what royals & assorted hangers-on did as long as the oiks didn’t get to know about it.
And why should it matter what his personal preferences were? If his wife tolerated it why is it of any significance to anyone else?
Because there are grave and ongoing allegations against him? This is from two days ago
“‘I was raped by Mountbatten in Kincora at age 11; he wasn’t a lord… to me he was king of the paedophiles’
Veteran journalist Chris Moore interviewed three victims of the senior royal killed by the IRA in 1979 for his new book on ‘the most enduring child sex scandal in the history of the UK’. He says the story won’t go away despite a huge Establishment cover-up”
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is exclusively on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods. So when the studies have been down that shows the population have consumed less sugar the evidence isn't really that their favourite sugary drink has been taxes / reformulated a bit, it is that things all things like pasta sauces have far less sugar.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
Sugar is a single thing. Ultra-processed food is lots of different things lumped together.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Since the Boriswave didn't lead to any magic economic boost, especially not in GDP per head, I think we can discount this too.
Boris always said that he was pro-immigration. Patel advocated for Brexit saying that Brexit would mean the UK could liberalise migration from the sub-continent.
Boris and Patel took Brexit's freedoms and liberated migration from the sub-continent exactly as they said they would do.
There's no grand conspiracy. They said what they believed in and what they were going to do. It was Ronseal politics.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, the sugar tax it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks these days, despite the sugar tax / general cost of them, which come in increasingly bigger cans (they are selling ones with more than 500ml in a single can).
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks, despite the sugar tax / cost.
Again, energy drinks being subject to the tax have been formulated to be low sugar, whereas more natural bottled energy drinks like coffees etc are not.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
I don't think much of his material but the Austrian singer has an extraordinary voice. No-one who sings that high in their range has that much power, even if classically trained.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks, despite the sugar tax / cost.
Again, energy drinks being subject to the tax have been formulated to be low sugar, whereas more natural bottled energy drinks like coffees etc are not.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
Normal monster hasn't been reformulated. 500ml can contains 55g of sugar. The full sugar costs the same in the shop as the zero. Guess which one I see the yutt gruzzling.
In fact increasingly I see the likes of Monster full sugar is cheaper in the shops than coke zero etc.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
It's Sunday morning and I'm in a reasonable mood so I'm going to be charitable to the Conservative Party (frame this, it doesn't happen often).
Putting the whole EU business to one side (not easy but the ramifications of departure have been overstated by both sides), it wasn't easy being in Government at the start of the 2020s.
You had the biggest public health emergency since WW2 and the outbreak of armed conflict in or near Europe - each on their own was destabilising, both together were and have been disastrous.
We can, have and no doubt will again debate the UK Government to COVID but the point was the Government put health before wealth - the economy was basically closed down for three months (the PMI graph is frightening) to protect people from the virus. I don't want to debate the rights and wrongs of that - it happened. The consequences of the dislocation were both immediate and longer lasting, indeed, well after the vaccine had been rolled out and the immediate threat ended.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine which, far from being the swift decisive action Putin and Moscow might have hoped, has turned into a bloody war of attrition more like WW1 than what we think of as modern warfare.
The big problem was when the pent up demand was released - people who had spent little or nothing for months and had accumulated cash reserves wanted to spend but the struggling global supply chains meant many things were in short supply - the result, inflation. It was that which killed Governments world wide, the fact of big price rises making everyone feel worse off.
Governments took the blame and felt the anger - after 14 years leading the Government, the UK Conservatives had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In many ways, it did for them as the 2008 crisis had done for Governments then.
Traditional politics of what you might call "the centre" has been discredited twice and it's understandable people look elsewhere - if you want to call it nationalist, socially conservative, anti-immigrant, populist or whatever, parties like Reform, VOX, Chega, BSW and others have emerged.
I think the reason that the COVID response led to disillusionment with the centre & with liberal/intellectual elites in certain countries, but not others could be differences in COVID death rates.
Both the UK & the US had relatively high COVID death rates. The UK death rate was 3404 per million and the US one was 3493 per million. Both countries are now experiencing a rise of populist movements.
Conversely, Australia had a very low death rate of 963 per million, while Canada's was 1424 per million. In both Canada and Australia, there hasn't been any significant populist movement, and the centre has retained broad political support.
I think it's possible that the high death rates in the UK & USA led to a perception that COVID restrictions were imposed by the "elites" but that these policies "failed" because there was still a large number of deaths.
In Australia & Canada, there is a perhaps a different perception that the restrictions were worth it, in terms of saving lots of lives, and therefore that the "elites" are competent & know what they are doing.
Correlation is not causation. And, besides, there are many counter examples
Rightwing populism is driven by many things. Top of a long list is mass migration. Covid response might be in the list but it’s not top 10
The problem with "its migration" is of course what happens as and when mass migration stops.
There is a veneer or "too many people who look and sound different" but at its heart the migration push back is economic.
The challenge for a supposed Reform government is that if there is an abrupt freeze in migration, the economy gets worse, not better. Which is the exact opposite of what punters expect.
The real challenge for a possible Reform government is that they have no coherent program. Like Brexit, they've various headlines which appeal to the electorate, some very strongly, but actually implementing them will be impossible.
There's a democratic fallacy that just because a majority vote for something, then it can be implemented in a manner which satisfies those who voted for it.
This. I don't see anything that tells me a Reform government won't be just like another Boris one.
It depends on whether Farage will be a compulsive liar.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks, despite the sugar tax / cost.
Again, energy drinks being subject to the tax have been formulated to be low sugar, whereas more natural bottled energy drinks like coffees etc are not.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
Normal monster hasn't been reformulated. 500ml can contains 55g of sugar.
But there's far, far, far more choice now in Zero options now than there were.
As someone who has always bought sugarfree drinks (for dental reasons originally, even before I cut sugar from my diet), its been a very notable trend.
Pre sugar tax you might get a solitary zero option and all the flavoured options were full sugar. Now the inverse is often true, with the sugarfree choices being cheaper of course.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Rishi Sunak might go down in history as the last Conservative Prime Minister, not the first Asian one.
I think if he'd held on until November they'd be in a much better place too, probably an extra 50 seats vs what the Tories actually got. Going early didn't make sense and it really cost them badly.
Very slowly Rishi and Hunt were restoring the Tory reputation on competence that had been so rashly thrown away by Truss and Boris. I think another few months and they'd have been able to claw a reasonable proportion of the millions who stayed home because they lost faith after Truss. He just didn't have enough time to get the stink off.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks, despite the sugar tax / cost.
Again, energy drinks being subject to the tax have been formulated to be low sugar, whereas more natural bottled energy drinks like coffees etc are not.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
Normal monster hasn't been reformulated. 500ml can contains 55g of sugar.
But there's far, far, far more choice now in Zero options now than there were.
As someone who has always bought sugarfree drinks (for dental reasons originally, even before I cut sugar from my diet), its been a very notable trend.
Pre sugar tax you might get a solitary zero option and all the flavoured options were full sugar. Now the inverse is often true, with the sugarfree choices being cheaper of course.
Not ture. Go into any supermarket, there is no different in price generally between sugar or sugar-free. In fact, on the multipack, I noticed the sugar free monster zero was £1 more expensive the other day in Sainsburys.
As I say we did this on here a few months ago and the evidence was the sugar tax on drinks really wasn't changing behaviour, the reduction in particularly kid intake of sugar was coming from the reformulation of processed food that has nothing to do with the sugar tax. Kids choices are still bad when it comes to drinks, actually worse, because they are getting addicted to energy drinks at a young age.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily. So consumers are consuming less sugar from their food without any idea or via the idea that taxation is nudging them away from full sugar coke to sugar free sparkling water.
The tax nudged food companies, not consumers. By cutting sugar content they could maintain profit margins.
Interesting anecdote from an otherwise totally apolitical reunion in Hereford yesterday.
(Hereford has had a weird recent history as our Herefordian travel writer has noted: the old town centre has been hollowed out by a new shopping mall in the old cattle market and looks desolate. But the other bits of town remain pretty and reasonably prosperous).
A lot of recent politics seems to be about frustration that despite promises by everyone to fix things, nothing happens. Right? Well speaking to people from North Herefordshire that’s precisely the reason the greens won the seat in 2024. Chicken farmers have been dumping organic waste close to the Wye for years, and the river and groundwater are eutrophic and blighted. What used to be a clear, swimmable river brimming with salmon and trout is dead.
But nothing has been done. The previous Tory MP was an ex farmer and never made a concerted effort to get it fixed. The Green vote was a vote of frustration. Pretty much a single issue election.
I was aware of the long running issue but the whole “and nobody did anything despite years of campaigning” was interesting.
Quite sad to hear the town centre is still knackered
And yes indeed on the Wye. An utter disgrace. The chicken farmers should go to jail. I could sense the local anger in 2023 and it was obvious the Tories were in deep trouble
I really do hope the Tories die. They’ve had their time. Enough
By coincidence, I have just watched the latest release of "Turdtowns", for Herefordshire, on YouTube. Hereford gets a mention but Leominster is the worst.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily. So consumers are consuming less sugar from their food without any idea or via the idea that taxation is nudging them away from full sugar coke to sugar free sparkling water.
The tax nudged food companies, not consumers. By cutting sugar content they could maintain profit margins.
The tax had nothing to do with food it was exclusively drink. It was a separate initiate by the government to lobby them to reformulate their foods. Now you could say that was under the implied threat of sugar take on everything, maybe, but the extra pennies on full sugar coke is not making any difference on choices made.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily. So consumers are consuming less sugar from their food without any idea or via the idea that taxation is nudging them away from full sugar coke to sugar free sparkling water.
Indeed. As I have argued before that to get better health outcomes in the general populace, a good way is to make the foods that we all consume better for us, rather than scolding people about what they eat - where the scolding is probably misguided anyway.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks, despite the sugar tax / cost.
Again, energy drinks being subject to the tax have been formulated to be low sugar, whereas more natural bottled energy drinks like coffees etc are not.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
Normal monster hasn't been reformulated. 500ml can contains 55g of sugar.
But there's far, far, far more choice now in Zero options now than there were.
As someone who has always bought sugarfree drinks (for dental reasons originally, even before I cut sugar from my diet), its been a very notable trend.
Pre sugar tax you might get a solitary zero option and all the flavoured options were full sugar. Now the inverse is often true, with the sugarfree choices being cheaper of course.
Not ture. Go into any supermarket, there is no different in price generally between sugar or sugar-free. In fact, on the multipack, I noticed the sugar free monster zero was £1 more expensive the other day in Sainsburys.
Not sure where you shop but I always see the Zero option being cheaper.
The Boriswave may turn out to be the single most consequential act by a British government in a generation. Two generations. Bigger than Brexit
Because not only has it - apparently - killed the Tories it may also have scuppered Labour and instead propelled a populist right wing party into the lead
Like a kind of political atom bomb with unpredictable fallout
What were they thinking?!
Nothing. They weren't.
It was clear after Boris won in Dec 2019, that he intended to do absolutely fuck all in office except make speeches and bonk Carrie.
The only real success he had was the Brexit deal, where I think Frost actually did a good job.
Some PBer (apologies, forget who) posited the theory that they knowingly allowed the Boriswave because they were scared care/NHS etc would collapse after Brexit and the ending of FOM
It’s not a great theory but at least it’s a theory. There aren’t many
I’ve also heard it argued that some Brexiteers are secret Open Borders types. They genuinely believe in this lunacy. If so they should be REDACTED
Otherwise we are left with simple but grotesque incompetence
It's not a secret. I had a drink with Dan Hannan at a Vote Leave event shortly before the vote, and he essentially said this to my face. And then told me George Osborne told him he, personally, favoured the euro.
What they saw was that in the latter Blair/Brown years growth was largely being driven by large influxes of immigrants, in their case from the EU and running into the millions. The result was that they boasted strong growth figures (the per capita numbers being somewhat less impressive).
Their fear was that if this source of "growth" was cut off Brexit might look like a failure and some of the absurd modelling (which in fairness did reflect immigrant induced "growth") might even prove to be true. So they looked elsewhere for alternatives. It wasn't hard to find them.
Could they have done otherwise? Well, yes but their coalition wanted to believe in 6 impossible things before breakfast and they calculated that Labour was unlikely to scream about it.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Since the Boriswave didn't lead to any magic economic boost, especially not in GDP per head, I think we can discount this too.
Boris always said that he was pro-immigration. Patel advocated for Brexit saying that Brexit would mean the UK could liberalise migration from the sub-continent.
Boris and Patel took Brexit's freedoms and liberated migration from the sub-continent exactly as they said they would do.
There's no grand conspiracy. They said what they believed in and what they were going to do. It was Ronseal politics.
I agree.
Johnson even used the term "our friends " from the Indian subcontinent. Those of you bemoaning recent immigration from the Indian subcontinent were promised that it would be a positive outcome from Brexit, as we turfed out the Eastern Europeans that we didn't like, but needed others to fulfil their job roles. We got exactly what Johnson promised us. For once he told us the truth.
You have half a point there, but I'm unconvinced that he promised 600k plus net migration though.
19th out of 26 entries! The final only has 26 berths.
That GBNews piece epitomises what we were saying the other day about the decline of journalism. There's no investigation, no phone hacking, just copy/paste from TwiX (and even this will soon be left to AI):-
"Literally worst top 3 EVER omg," one X user fumed, while a second echoed: "This is gonna be remembered as one of the worst Eurovision scoreboard of all time. This is actually disgusting to look at."
A third concurred: "Worst #Eurovision ever. Insane strobe lights burning my retinas. The dumb televoting. Lack of any real bangers. Just plain ass. Mainly the strobe lights tho."
Another echoed: "Sorry, but for me this was one of the worst Eurovision contests ever. I just couldn’t make sense of the voting results. #Eurovision2025."
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
Cats are easy to handle if you're nice to them. Well, 90% are. The 66% must be people who like dogs and don't like cats.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks, despite the sugar tax / cost.
Again, energy drinks being subject to the tax have been formulated to be low sugar, whereas more natural bottled energy drinks like coffees etc are not.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
Normal monster hasn't been reformulated. 500ml can contains 55g of sugar.
But there's far, far, far more choice now in Zero options now than there were.
As someone who has always bought sugarfree drinks (for dental reasons originally, even before I cut sugar from my diet), its been a very notable trend.
Pre sugar tax you might get a solitary zero option and all the flavoured options were full sugar. Now the inverse is often true, with the sugarfree choices being cheaper of course.
Not ture. Go into any supermarket, there is no different in price generally between sugar or sugar-free. In fact, on the multipack, I noticed the sugar free monster zero was £1 more expensive the other day in Sainsburys.
Not sure where you shop but I always see the Zero option being cheaper.
It may be those hoping for the death of the Conservative Party are somewhat premature. Parties change and evolve so they become unrecognisable from previous incarnations.
The problem for the Conservatives is, having been used to being either the Party of Government or the only credible alternative Government (however remote a prospect that might have seemed at some points as it did for Labour), they face the prospect of minor party status and all that doesn't flow from it.
The LDs have been a minor party for decades - they are used to being ignored and ridiculed. The Conservatives aren't - yes, they still have over 4,000 Councillors and 121 MPs so they remain a force but the trend isn't looking promising currently.
Could they re-invent? Yes, but as what? Reform's junior but more likeable partner? A more rural based grouping analogous to the Country parties you see in other democracies?
The irony is the Conservatives spent the 20th Century swallowing up disparate parts of the Liberal movement - Liberal Nationals, National Liberals etc. Perhaps the 21st Century will see the Liberal Democrats absorb the rump of Liberal Conservatives while the others end up with Reform - who knows?
The only thing of which I'm certain is nothing is certain - Keir Starmer looked the least likely of Prime Ministers in the spring of 2021 but look what happened to him. Kemi Badenoch needs a little "luck" and who knows what could happen?
At least they have a party, with (most of) the right wing nutters in another party, unlike their American counterparts who are sitting held hostage in the GOP just hoping that one day, sanity might return.
Meanwhile, perhaps the Tories should reflect on the merits of a fairer voting system?
Let’s think about “fairer voting system”philosophically for a moment.
You believe (I think) that the national proportion of votes cast should roughly reflect the number of seats in the Commons.
However, that’s not what Parliament is for: it is to ensure that all parts of the country are represented. Even under FPTP you have an issue with dominance by London and the central party organisations. There is the ability for local communities to choose representatives that reflect their wishes (eg the Gaza movement) and even when they don’t London politicians have to pay lip service at least to the wishes of the local community.
If you move to a system where the only thing that matters is how you are perceived by the central organisation how much attention do you think local communities will really get from most politicians?
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Since the Boriswave didn't lead to any magic economic boost, especially not in GDP per head, I think we can discount this too.
Boris always said that he was pro-immigration. Patel advocated for Brexit saying that Brexit would mean the UK could liberalise migration from the sub-continent.
Boris and Patel took Brexit's freedoms and liberated migration from the sub-continent exactly as they said they would do.
There's no grand conspiracy. They said what they believed in and what they were going to do. It was Ronseal politics.
I agree.
Johnson even used the term "our friends " from the Indian subcontinent. Those of you bemoaning recent immigration from the Indian subcontinent were promised that it would be a positive outcome from Brexit, as we turfed out the Eastern Europeans that we didn't like, but needed others to fulfil their job roles. We got exactly what Johnson promised us. For once he told us the truth.
You have half a point there, but I'm unconvinced that he promised 600k plus net migration though.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
We have done this before. The evidence on this is extremely debatable on the direct effects of sugar tax on drinks. Sticking a few pence on sugary drinks doesn't seem to have dissuaded teenage kids drinking lakes full of sugary energy drinks.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily.
Considering that the areas exempt from the tax are still full of sugar (eg milkshakes/bottled coffees etc) it doesn't seem entirely voluntary to me.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
No, sugar tax is on drinks. The government got the industry to agree to reduce sugar in quite a lot of processed foods.
I was talking about drinks. Drinks like Fanta etc were reformulated so that even the non-Zero version was just below the tax threshold, whereas drinks like bottled coffees (exempt from the tax) etc were not.
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
Yes, but in terms of it having a large impact on reducing people sugar intake, it really isn't a big part of it. And teenage kids are hosing everything down with stupid amount of energy drinks, despite the sugar tax / cost.
Again, energy drinks being subject to the tax have been formulated to be low sugar, whereas more natural bottled energy drinks like coffees etc are not.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
Normal monster hasn't been reformulated. 500ml can contains 55g of sugar.
But there's far, far, far more choice now in Zero options now than there were.
As someone who has always bought sugarfree drinks (for dental reasons originally, even before I cut sugar from my diet), its been a very notable trend.
Pre sugar tax you might get a solitary zero option and all the flavoured options were full sugar. Now the inverse is often true, with the sugarfree choices being cheaper of course.
Not ture. Go into any supermarket, there is no different in price generally between sugar or sugar-free. In fact, on the multipack, I noticed the sugar free monster zero was £1 more expensive the other day in Sainsburys.
Not sure where you shop but I always see the Zero option being cheaper.
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Rishi Sunak might go down in history as the last Conservative Prime Minister, not the first Asian one.
I think if he'd held on until November they'd be in a much better place too, probably an extra 50 seats vs what the Tories actually got. Going early didn't make sense and it really cost them badly.
Very slowly Rishi and Hunt were restoring the Tory reputation on competence that had been so rashly thrown away by Truss and Boris. I think another few months and they'd have been able to claw a reasonable proportion of the millions who stayed home because they lost faith after Truss. He just didn't have enough time to get the stink off.
I was completely bewildered by the Conservatives' behaviour. From calling an election that wrongfooted them, more than their opponents, to successive pratfalls, in the campaign, to insiders betting on the date of the election.
@Dura_Ace ”Ridden like Mountbatten’s aide de camp” is nautical language, I imagine.
Given his vanity, love of uniforms, and high fashion, the fact Mountbatten managed to bury himself so deep in the closet is a historical wonder.
Don’t think it was buried that deeply (ooer!), I had it on good authority that he was known as Lord Mountbottom in the royal household. That was in the good old days when it didn’t matter what royals & assorted hangers-on did as long as the oiks didn’t get to know about it.
And why should it matter what his personal preferences were? If his wife tolerated it why is it of any significance to anyone else?
Because there are grave and ongoing allegations against him? This is from two days ago
“‘I was raped by Mountbatten in Kincora at age 11; he wasn’t a lord… to me he was king of the paedophiles’
Veteran journalist Chris Moore interviewed three victims of the senior royal killed by the IRA in 1979 for his new book on ‘the most enduring child sex scandal in the history of the UK’. He says the story won’t go away despite a huge Establishment cover-up”
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
I’ve always thought that 34% was my fellow cat owners.
The Boriswave was 100% about ameliorating the economic vandalism of brexit and avoiding any real restructuring. This was predicted ahead of time by those of us who can 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙾𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙴.
Since the Boriswave didn't lead to any magic economic boost, especially not in GDP per head, I think we can discount this too.
Boris always said that he was pro-immigration. Patel advocated for Brexit saying that Brexit would mean the UK could liberalise migration from the sub-continent.
Boris and Patel took Brexit's freedoms and liberated migration from the sub-continent exactly as they said they would do.
There's no grand conspiracy. They said what they believed in and what they were going to do. It was Ronseal politics.
I agree.
Johnson even used the term "our friends " from the Indian subcontinent. Those of you bemoaning recent immigration from the Indian subcontinent were promised that it would be a positive outcome from Brexit, as we turfed out the Eastern Europeans that we didn't like, but needed others to fulfil their job roles. We got exactly what Johnson promised us. For once he told us the truth.
You have half a point there, but I'm unconvinced that he promised 600k plus net migration though.
He didn't.
However he also didn't promise "tens of thousands" of net migrants, unlike Cameron and May before him. He abolished that pledge.
When I was in Hereford recently I didn't particularly notice that the town centre was in a bad state, I was just enjoying the fact that it's a wonderfully spacious town centre compared to most English towns.
It’s definitely spacious, and it has the shape and location to be a really pleasant place. The trouble is that “high town” was given the 1980s treatment and needs reinvention: it was pedestrianised, given over to large chain stores like M&S and Woolworths, emptied of pubs and restaurants (those are all in the streets outside high town), and fitted with a small undercover precinct called Maylord Orchard. The latter is almost entirely boarded up.
People don’t shop at those chain stores anymore, and the ones they do - like TKMaxx or H&M - have moved out to a new development a stone’s throw away on the old cattle market. So the centre is emptying.
But it could be transformed.
1. Convert some units to residential 2. Allow more outdoor seating for restaurants and cafes 3. Plant trees and gardens in the central area, which is practically large enough to count as a square 4. Get markets and food trucks in
In any case, the part of Hereford running from the old bridge through the cathedral close, castle street and down to castle green remains one of the prettiest city centres in the country.
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
Cats are easy to handle if you're nice to them. Well, 90% are. The 66% must be people who like dogs and don't like cats.
Speaking sternly, offering a treat and waving a lead and ball don't work. This confuses dog owners who then have no other go to strategy. I can tell which teachers are dog lovers in a few seconds.
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
The other 34% have tried to give a cat a pill. Edit: beaten by TSE.
Interesting anecdote from an otherwise totally apolitical reunion in Hereford yesterday.
(Hereford has had a weird recent history as our Herefordian travel writer has noted: the old town centre has been hollowed out by a new shopping mall in the old cattle market and looks desolate. But the other bits of town remain pretty and reasonably prosperous).
A lot of recent politics seems to be about frustration that despite promises by everyone to fix things, nothing happens. Right? Well speaking to people from North Herefordshire that’s precisely the reason the greens won the seat in 2024. Chicken farmers have been dumping organic waste close to the Wye for years, and the river and groundwater are eutrophic and blighted. What used to be a clear, swimmable river brimming with salmon and trout is dead.
But nothing has been done. The previous Tory MP was an ex farmer and never made a concerted effort to get it fixed. The Green vote was a vote of frustration. Pretty much a single issue election.
I was aware of the long running issue but the whole “and nobody did anything despite years of campaigning” was interesting.
Quite sad to hear the town centre is still knackered
And yes indeed on the Wye. An utter disgrace. The chicken farmers should go to jail. I could sense the local anger in 2023 and it was obvious the Tories were in deep trouble
I really do hope the Tories die. They’ve had their time. Enough
By coincidence, I have just watched the latest release of "Turdtowns", for Herefordshire, on YouTube. Hereford gets a mention but Leominster is the worst.
That’s ridiculous
Hereford and Leominster are both lovely handsome towns - at least by post war British standards! Being relatively remote and poor they managed to avoid hideous redevelopment in the 50s-80s, so they have remained essentially pretty
All they need is an injection of pride and some money. They will be back. The bones are there
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
Cats are easy to handle if you're nice to them. Well, 90% are. The 66% must be people who like dogs and don't like cats.
Speaking sternly, offering a treat and waving a lead and ball don't work. This confuses dog owners who then have no other go to strategy. I can tell which teachers are dog lovers in a few seconds.
When I was in Hereford recently I didn't particularly notice that the town centre was in a bad state, I was just enjoying the fact that it's a wonderfully spacious town centre compared to most English towns.
It’s definitely spacious, and it has the shape and location to be a really pleasant place. The trouble is that “high town” was given the 1980s treatment and needs reinvention: it was pedestrianised, given over to large chain stores like M&S and Woolworths, emptied of pubs and restaurants (those are all in the streets outside high town), and fitted with a small undercover precinct called Maylord Orchard. The latter is almost entirely boarded up.
People don’t shop at those chain stores anymore, and the ones they do - like TKMaxx or H&M - have moved out to a new development a stone’s throw away on the old cattle market. So the centre is emptying.
But it could be transformed.
1. Convert some units to residential 2. Allow more outdoor seating for restaurants and cafes 3. Plant trees and gardens in the central area, which is practically large enough to count as a square 4. Get markets and food trucks in
In any case, the part of Hereford running from the old bridge through the cathedral close, castle street and down to castle green remains one of the prettiest city centres in the country.
Absolutely right
It won’t take much to revive Hereford. Just some modest brains and ambition
Interesting anecdote from an otherwise totally apolitical reunion in Hereford yesterday.
(Hereford has had a weird recent history as our Herefordian travel writer has noted: the old town centre has been hollowed out by a new shopping mall in the old cattle market and looks desolate. But the other bits of town remain pretty and reasonably prosperous).
A lot of recent politics seems to be about frustration that despite promises by everyone to fix things, nothing happens. Right? Well speaking to people from North Herefordshire that’s precisely the reason the greens won the seat in 2024. Chicken farmers have been dumping organic waste close to the Wye for years, and the river and groundwater are eutrophic and blighted. What used to be a clear, swimmable river brimming with salmon and trout is dead.
But nothing has been done. The previous Tory MP was an ex farmer and never made a concerted effort to get it fixed. The Green vote was a vote of frustration. Pretty much a single issue election.
I was aware of the long running issue but the whole “and nobody did anything despite years of campaigning” was interesting.
Quite sad to hear the town centre is still knackered
And yes indeed on the Wye. An utter disgrace. The chicken farmers should go to jail. I could sense the local anger in 2023 and it was obvious the Tories were in deep trouble
I really do hope the Tories die. They’ve had their time. Enough
By coincidence, I have just watched the latest release of "Turdtowns", for Herefordshire, on YouTube. Hereford gets a mention but Leominster is the worst.
That’s ridiculous
Hereford and Leominster are both lovely handsome towns - at least by post war British standards! Being relatively remote and poor they managed to avoid hideous redevelopment in the 50s-80s, so they have remained essentially pretty
All they need is an injection of pride and some money. They will be back. The bones are there
Yeah, the guy admitted that all the Herefordshire towns would never have made the list in any other county.
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
I’ve always thought that 34% was my fellow cat owners.
It came after the FDF waged a campaign to put pressure on the DHSC to rewrite its nutrition policy, lobbying officials to remove the push to minimally processed food in the guidance issued to retailers, according to documents and emails reviewed by the Guardian.
In response to a freedom of information request, the government released a cache of emails between the FDF and the DHSC.
Most of the correspondence was heavily redacted. The government cited section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, “which provides for the protection of personal information”, and section 35(1)(a), “which provides protection for the information that relates to the formulation or development of government policy”.
The emails, sent between October 2022 and April 2023, reveal how the FDF, which represents firms with a combined annual turnover of more than £112bn, lobbied the DHSC to drop the guidance pushing retailers to promote minimally processed food...
I'm no food expert and subsist on a perfectly balanced diet of fish (protein) and chips (fat and carbohydrates) every day, and an apple.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
OTOH measures which industry lobbyists moan about have been significant successes - the extra tax on high sugar, for example, which reduced sugar levels in drinks to just below the threshold. And which has shown to deliver health benefits.
Sugar is a single thing. Ultra-processed food is lots of different things lumped together.
I've become convinced this is poisoning us. I've seen kids born just six or seven years ago (so after May came to power) already be extremely fat. Everyone is eating shit and ordering terrible pizzas from Deliveroo.
I'm not sure what the right policy response is, but I'm definitely in the something must be done category now.
I agree with others on here that it is less about Badenoch (though she isn’t doing well by any means) and more about the general state of the Tory Party.
It might be that they have simply terminally damaged their brand. We can point to pendulums swinging back over time but there’s no law of the universe that this must happen. Maybe considering their myriad failings in government they’re just too far gone for a recovery, particularly when there is a competing party of the right.
I think if we are going to point to one potentially fatal wound, the Truss episode in particular did tremendous damage to them. Not only because Truss was incompetent and overpromoted, but also because removing a PM after a month just doesn’t make a party look serious about governing.
Partygate, then into Truss, I suggest is critical. If Johnson had gone in a planned, dignified manner, that would’ve been one thing, but to go from crisis to another crisis was quite something.
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
High incidence of severe allergies, or fear of lions ?
Sadly, this is all self-inflicted. The Johnson/Truss administrations simply destroyed the trust and confidence of their supporters.
Rishi Sunak might go down in history as the last Conservative Prime Minister, not the first Asian one.
I think if he'd held on until November they'd be in a much better place too, probably an extra 50 seats vs what the Tories actually got. Going early didn't make sense and it really cost them badly.
Very slowly Rishi and Hunt were restoring the Tory reputation on competence that had been so rashly thrown away by Truss and Boris. I think another few months and they'd have been able to claw a reasonable proportion of the millions who stayed home because they lost faith after Truss. He just didn't have enough time to get the stink off.
I was completely bewildered by the Conservatives' behaviour. From calling an election that wrongfooted them, more than their opponents, to successive pratfalls, in the campaign, to insiders betting on the date of the election.
Recurring patterns for several years had been an inability to think ahead or to have any self-control.
They never seemed to ask themselves what would happen if things didn't go to plan or if knowledge became public.
Only 66% of Brits think they could beat a cat in a fight? We may have a minority of over-confident fighters, but we also have a lot who are pretty underconfident.
I’ve always thought that 34% was my fellow cat owners.
Have you ever tried giving a cat a pill?
There's a reason that nobody has ever tried Schrödinger's "put a cat in a sealed box" thought experiment.
Comments
Growing up with parents who were Tory members, it always struck me that their self image was essentially of being sensible, non-political people - indeed if I ever tried to argue with them, it was usually only minutes before any challenge was dismissed with one of the many variants of "why bring politics into it?" (or that "Labour would only make things worse" - which amounts to the same thing).
Their view of the wider left was that it was driven by ideology and politics whereas conservatives were sensible people who stuck to what worked and weren't driven by ideology. So any left-wing idea was "politics" and any conservative idea was simply practical common sense!
In the 1990s - as you say - that started to change with Thatcher, with the wets v drys and the emergence of policy driven by ideology on the right. To begin with, the new government was pragmatic in that, taking the wider view, the changes being made, if sometimes radical, were both necessary and broadly worked, at least in the medium term (the longer term fallout we still suffer today). And political historians remind us that the early 90s governments were more pragmatic and flexible than they now seem viewed through the prism of their downfall. Early Thatcher was also broadly pro-EEC, as an economic arrangement that was delivering for the UK.
Things started to go off the rails during late Thatcher, with the rise of ideological anti-Europeanism and other policy changes driven by ideology - culminating with the poll tax.
Major did his best to restore pragmatic conservatism - and pulled off a big win on the back of it - and Cameron eventually made it back into power with a modernised version of the same, after flirting with ideology during the long years of opposition got the Tories precisely nowhere. But they never took on the UKIP tendency eating away from below within their own ranks, and Cameron's cunning plan to see them off backfired badly.
The frothing about any agreements with the EU that we saw from the Tory spokesman on this morning's LK simply illustrates that the Tories are as yet neither near nor heading towards Reality Checkpoint.
My parents have literally just rejected doing this due to cost, and losing c.£80k in so doing, so are now living in a house that's far too big for them.
I kinda know Dan and I’m pleased to hear he’s not an idiot. I too had no real problems with FoM (but I respect those who do - I’m not a plumber)
My beef with the EU was and is sovereignty and democracy
But, knowing them, they'll sit tight and wait for the cards to fall in their lap, rather than do anything active to bring it about, and then simply repeat the same behaviour in office again.
I have no confidence in their ability to deliver for their base or deliver good governance for the country anymore.
Team bus unable to get through the blue smoke and the folk.
Wish I were there.
But. It isn't going anywhere. So I can again.
And. When folk say we don't build anything nice outside London, have a trip to Bramley Moore dock.
It's beautiful. Well worth losing World Heritage status for.
It wasn't done on the cheap. Nor to maximise every last penny. But with love.
Maybe there's a lesson?
UTFT!!
They could be maddening, as they spluttered into their G and Ts about single mothers or penpushers. They also had a curious blind spot, hating regulation except when it protected their business. But they did have real businesses doing real things, and connections with the communities they served.
Trouble is that they are much less common than they used to be, because those sorts of businesses are. And the Conservatives are much more interested in tickling hedgies, because that's where the money is. One of the understandable strands in Reform at grass roots level is a wish to go back to those older times. Shame it's mixed in with so much toxic fantasising.
The other councils were, from memory, Hampshire, Surrey, East and West Sussex, the Isle of Wight and the other one. Based on what we saw elsewhere, it's not hard to imagine big Conservative losses to the LDs, Reform and Greens in those councils. Indeed, you can argue Badenoch can thank Angela Rayner for not making a disastrous result catastrophic and potentially job-threatening.
Patel advocated for Brexit saying that Brexit would mean the UK could liberalise migration from the sub-continent.
Boris and Patel took Brexit's freedoms and liberated migration from the sub-continent exactly as they said they would do.
There's no grand conspiracy. They said what they believed in and what they were going to do. It was Ronseal politics.
But I'm suspicious of food arguments that lump "ultra-processed food" into a single category. Over the decades, everything around food resembles one set of faddists arguing with another group of faddists. Or fattests.
Nor am I shocked that industry lobbyists lobby for industry-favourable outcomes. That's their mission statement.
I think if he ran as a Labour candidate, he'd win easily.
But a nostalgia for competence on the right.
And yes indeed on the Wye. An utter disgrace. The chicken farmers should go to jail. I could sense the local anger in 2023 and it was obvious the Tories were in deep trouble
I really do hope the Tories die. They’ve had their time. Enough
Boris Johnson is trying to wash his hands of the unprecedented wave of migration that has seen more than one million people move to the UK in each of the last three years. He was confronted about this ‘Boriswave’ on the Triggernometry podcast yesterday [in March 2025] and told the hosts that rather than being the result of his decisions, Covid and the Migration Advisory Committee were to blame. Are his explanations convincing?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-boris-right-about-the-boriswave/
The Spectator fisks Boris's claim that the Boriswave was nothing to do with him, honest, a big boy did it and ran away.
“‘I was raped by Mountbatten in Kincora at age 11; he wasn’t a lord… to me he was king of the paedophiles’
Veteran journalist Chris Moore interviewed three victims of the senior royal killed by the IRA in 1979 for his new book on ‘the most enduring child sex scandal in the history of the UK’. He says the story won’t go away despite a huge Establishment cover-up”
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/i-was-raped-by-mountbatten-in-kincora-at-age-11-he-wasnt-a-lord-to-me-he-was-king-of-the-paedophiles/a41686225.html
The Belfast Telegraph is quite a serious paper
I think Londoners would take great pleasure in telling him to fuck off.
See our recent discussions on the rampant fraud, abuse and the whole scheme being shut down.
Even if they were all working in care, which they're not, bringing in more dependents than workers when the workers are unskilled minimum wage employees is utter economic madness.
Raising pay would have been a far better solution. Its amazing how many people on the left hate the concept of some people getting paid more than minimum wage.
Le Pen - moderate yourself decade after decade, AfD - oh look a CDU revival even after the Merkelwave, Lega - you were always the madmen not the pragmatists of the Italian new right, let's have the proven pragmatists.
The Tories have trashed their brand quite a lot on basic competence, but they still have the organisation and knowledge to outflank Reform on that, even if they decide to be new right.
As someone who avoids sugar/carbs, it pisses me off that all bottled coffee-based drinks are full of sugar.
There are naturally no carbs in coffee and milk is naturally minimal in it too, but there's no sugar-free low-carb coffee based bottled drinks ever available in the supermarket.
I dislike the nanny state in principle, but being selfish I hate the lack of sugar-free coffee-based drinks when I'm out and about and the need to go for some Monster or something similar if I want a caffeine drink that's sugar free rather than coffee.
I was too lazy to enquire about the details.
Therefore it isn't my fault.
That'll go on the Johnson epitaph.
A bigger measure / impact was the government convinced the food industry to reduce sugar content in a wide range of food voluntarily. So consumers are consuming less sugar from their food without any idea or via the idea that taxation is nudging them away from full sugar coke to sugar free sparkling water.
Johnson even used the term "our friends " from the Indian subcontinent. Those of you bemoaning recent immigration from the Indian subcontinent were promised that it would be a positive outcome from Brexit, as we turfed out the Eastern Europeans that we didn't like, but needed others to fulfil their job roles. We got exactly what Johnson promised us. For once he told us the truth.
The industry reformulated to deliberately be just below the threshold for things that would hit the threshold, avoiding the cliff-edge of having hit the threshold.
Almost as if people act to avoid hitting cliff edges in taxation. I wonder where else that could apply?
Badenoch made a decent go at explaining why this matters; no one minds an 18-23 year old French kid working in a bar on their gap year, but the danger is we will get a load of 29 year old unemployed Romanians turning up. Late 20s is not "youth", I'd say 25 was a bit old for a youth scheme
But Farage should welcome the 18-23 year old aspect of it, you don't want to be seen as a fun sponge
People act to avoid hitting thresholds in taxes if they can.
If I'm on the road and want to get a caffeine hit from a supermarket I'll either get a coffee from a machine made fresh if they do that, or get a can of Monster Zero because there's no sugar in that, whereas there's not a single damned sugarfree bottled coffee available despite the fact that coffee is naturally free from sugar.
In fact increasingly I see the likes of Monster full sugar is cheaper in the shops than coke zero etc.
As someone who has always bought sugarfree drinks (for dental reasons originally, even before I cut sugar from my diet), its been a very notable trend.
Pre sugar tax you might get a solitary zero option and all the flavoured options were full sugar. Now the inverse is often true, with the sugarfree choices being cheaper of course.
Very slowly Rishi and Hunt were restoring the Tory reputation on competence that had been so rashly thrown away by Truss and Boris. I think another few months and they'd have been able to claw a reasonable proportion of the millions who stayed home because they lost faith after Truss. He just didn't have enough time to get the stink off.
As I say we did this on here a few months ago and the evidence was the sugar tax on drinks really wasn't changing behaviour, the reduction in particularly kid intake of sugar was coming from the reformulation of processed food that has nothing to do with the sugar tax. Kids choices are still bad when it comes to drinks, actually worse, because they are getting addicted to energy drinks at a young age.
that Austrian song is surely the worst thing to have ever come out of Austria
https://x.com/pipterino/status/1923853630152573406?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
https://x.com/christiancalgie/status/1924029748398764482?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Asda
4 pack of Monster Zero £5.08 https://groceries.asda.com/product/energy-drinks/monster-energy-drink-ultra-zero-sugar-4-x-500-ml/910003056735
4 pack of Monster Original £5.58 https://groceries.asda.com/product/energy-drinks/monster-energy-drink-4-x-500-ml/910000471723
50p, nearly 10% extra for the sugar option.
And there's a whole array of Zero options all at the £5.08 price point. Whereas a few years ago there was only one and the rest were all full sugar.
Their fear was that if this source of "growth" was cut off Brexit might look like a failure and some of the absurd modelling (which in fairness did reflect immigrant induced "growth") might even prove to be true. So they looked elsewhere for alternatives. It wasn't hard to find them.
Could they have done otherwise? Well, yes but their coalition wanted to believe in 6 impossible things before breakfast and they calculated that Labour was unlikely to scream about it.
"Literally worst top 3 EVER omg," one X user fumed, while a second echoed: "This is gonna be remembered as one of the worst Eurovision scoreboard of all time. This is actually disgusting to look at."
A third concurred: "Worst #Eurovision ever. Insane strobe lights burning my retinas. The dumb televoting. Lack of any real bangers. Just plain ass. Mainly the strobe lights tho."
Another echoed: "Sorry, but for me this was one of the worst Eurovision contests ever. I just couldn’t make sense of the voting results. #Eurovision2025."
"This has literally been THE worst Eurovision ever, I'm sorry, nothing beats this crap of a score... #Eurovision2025," a fifth weighed in on X before a sixth social media user hit out:
https://www.gbnews.com/celebrity/bbc-eurovision-leaderboard-results-row-backlash-austria-israel
You believe (I think) that the national proportion of votes cast should roughly reflect the number of seats in the Commons.
However, that’s not what Parliament is for: it is to ensure that all parts of the country are represented. Even under FPTP you have an issue with dominance by London and the central party organisations. There is the ability for local communities to choose representatives that reflect their wishes (eg the Gaza movement) and even when they don’t London politicians have to pay lip service at least to the wishes of the local community.
If you move to a system where the only thing that matters is how you are perceived by the central organisation how much attention do you think local communities will really get from most politicians?
For me at least, sugar-free drinks (even with aspartame) combined with a protein-based diet low carb diet works very well.
Have you ever tried giving a cat a pill?
However he also didn't promise "tens of thousands" of net migrants, unlike Cameron and May before him. He abolished that pledge.
He didn't pledge any number.
People don’t shop at those chain stores anymore, and the ones they do - like TKMaxx or H&M - have moved out to a new development a stone’s throw away on the old cattle market. So the centre is emptying.
But it could be transformed.
1. Convert some units to residential
2. Allow more outdoor seating for restaurants and cafes
3. Plant trees and gardens in the central area, which is practically large enough to count as a square
4. Get markets and food trucks in
In any case, the part of Hereford running from the old bridge through the cathedral close, castle street and down to castle green remains one of the prettiest city centres in the country.
It seems I'm off to Sheffield next weekend.
My ninety-something godmother is expecting fish and chips.
This confuses dog owners who then have no other go to strategy.
I can tell which teachers are dog lovers in a few seconds.
Edit: beaten by TSE.
Hereford and Leominster are both lovely handsome towns - at least by post war British standards! Being relatively remote and poor they managed to avoid hideous redevelopment in the 50s-80s, so they have remained essentially pretty
All they need is an injection of pride and some money. They will be back. The bones are there
With a couple sent off.
@andrewrawnsley
·
1h
Rarely in the field of politics has so much electoral damage been wreaked for such a meagre cash saving
https://x.com/andrewrawnsley/status/1924031783399526604
Who could have guessed that?
It won’t take much to revive Hereford. Just some modest brains and ambition
https://youtu.be/I2n-_QCUGfU?t=126
"Your cat may wish to run off and hide afterwards."
I'm not sure what the right policy response is, but I'm definitely in the something must be done category now.
They never seemed to ask themselves what would happen if things didn't go to plan or if knowledge became public.