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In office but not in power – politicalbetting.com
In office but not in power – politicalbetting.com
Britons tend to say Reform UK are doing the most to set the political agenda at presentReform UK: 33%Labour: 19%Conservatives: 3%Lib Dems: 2%Greens: 2%yougov.co.uk/topics/polit…
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Reform is NOTA and its appeal is that the major parties are as bad as each other.
https://x.com/ChiefMI6/status/1929795380696305900
To mark Pride month, and to stand in solidarity with our LGBTQ+ colleagues, #MI6 is proudly flying the Pride flag from Vauxhall Cross, alongside the Union Flag, for the whole month of June. Your sexual orientation is no bar to you working and thriving at MI6 #Pride2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnQQZEQoDB4
Having arrived at the destination station, they've then kicked up the throttle, accelerated again, and whizzed straight through it and out the other side.
(Shopping calls; no time to dig up the links; sorry.)
He's a tedious tactical triangulator, not a leader, and that's why he's always reacting to the initiatives of others, and giving ground.
This also shows up in the international "deals" he makes.
Also OT, according to TRiE, Netflix regards YouTube as its biggest competitor, not broadcasters or the other streamers.
Axing the Triple Lock and ensuring work pays as well as benefits do would be a good start.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3e5wqq523ko
Two teenagers have been locked up for a firework attack which led to the death of widower in his terraced home in east London.
In the years leading up to the attack, Robert Price, 76, had been the target of a prolonged campaign of harassment and criminal damage, the Old Bailey was told.
Nathan Otitodilchukwu, 18, and a 16-year-old who cannot be named due to his age threatened to "torch" the pensioner before punching a hole in his window and pushing a firework into his home on Oval Road North, Dagenham, last July.
The pair had admitted manslaughter and were sentenced on Monday by Judge Rebecca Trowler KC.
Otitodilchukwu was jailed for six years and the youth was handed a custodial sentence of two years and eight months.
The pride pushback sits alongside the "DEI" pushback - in essence its why do we have to do these positive discrimination things?
We do them because people hire people, and it's very easy for people to hire people like themselves. Which is how we end up with industries which are white and male.
"Woke" people recognise this basic societal and sociological fact and look to do something about it. The anti-woke warriors also recognise it, but decry it because it means less jobs for people like them and more jobs for better qualified people who otherwise get missed because of their gender or race or sexuality or disability.
Back when I was a recruiting manager in a mid-level commercial role I made the point of hiring the best candidate. That made my team stand out from the norm because I hired some people who didn't look like me. At one point I had two women join the team. Women traditionally did the admin roles or category marketing, yet here I was hiring brilliant candidates who bucked this "tradition".
An anti-woke warrior manager asked why I "kept hiring young blonds". Knowing that he had a real problem with women getting promoted I just observed that it's because "I'm Hugh Heffner" as there can't be any other reason. He tried to put in a complaint with HR. And had his arse handed to him.
So we celebrate pride and we focus on women in business leadership or engineering and we try to hire to ensure that we have some diversity in the police. Because the alternative is that everyone is white and everyone is male. And if people don't like that, they need to look in the mirror.
It's called treating people as individuals.
Is it just having to hear about events, like gay tapestries, that might be of interest to others but you're not actually compelled to do yourself? Just as I have to hear about Lent, and Easter, and Christmas and all that other religious bullshit but don't have to actually do any of it myself.
In her speech today she said the government will increase defence spending to 2.5% by 2027 and work toward 3% in the next parliament
On the 24th - 26th of this month Starmer will attend the NATO meeting and sign up to 3.5% by 2035 + 1.5% associated defence spending in infrastructure and sea ports
Therefore 3.5% has to be found and without either tax rises including wealth taxes or cuts across the board then our defence and membership of NATO will be compromised
Apparently Starmer wants to put us on a war footing but in so doing defence has to take priority and that means now and not some ambition into the middle of the next decade
Just had a trawl of MiCs tables as its quite interesting to see the three within 7% of each other, leaders in regions as follows (just for interest sake)
Reform - Wales, East Mids, Yorks and Humber, North East, East England, South West
Labour - Greater London, North West
Tories - South East, West Midlands
SNP - Scotland
They could announce that pensions would be going up by 1% per annum in nominal terms (just as happened to many worker's wages in the past decade) with the money saved going into defence, from now until we hit the 3.5% figure.
No tax rises necessary. Taxes are already high, increasing them further is a choice not a necessity.
This is not governing, just idiotic politics
But until the electorate understand that politicians playing chicken with each other in GE campaigns over taxation & pensions does not lead to good outcomes for any of us this kind of bullshit is inevitable unfortunately.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/03/white-british-minority-in-40-years-report-claims/
However his statements aren't necessarily always positive for his party. For instance his backing scrapping the 2 child benefit cap for those on UC has seen Reform down 3% to 28% with the Conservatives up 2% to 21% on today's MoreinCommon poll as some Thatcherites shift back to the Tories after Kemi backed keeping the cap
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1930157861297946958
His captors insisted he give them a rundown of British intelligence. To oblige he invented a cast based on Evelyn Waugh characters
Telegraph Obituaries"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/06/03/roger-cooper-british-journalist-jailed-iran-tehran-spy/
Also, unless they've opened the extension towards Matlock, the trail starts in the middle of nowhere and ends even more in the middle of nowhere. It is not like an active travel route in a city, used by commuters: it is a *destination*. People travel - by car - to use it.
It makes the transport situation far worse, not better.
No, narrow gauge would be f-all use. As you well know for cyclists, we need *networks*, not disjointed sections.
Problem with "I do hire the best candidate" when you're looking at this at an organisational rather than individual manager / team level is that its very clear that the best candidates are very heavily white men.
I assume that "divisive woke bullshit" also includes white women, who find themselves almost entirely excluded from CEO positions - presumably because they're inferior to the men. Or women in engineering. Or non-whites in police forces in heavily diverse cities. Or a whole host of examples.
As I said, the pushback against "divisive woke bullshit" is because people refuse to see there is a problem with hiring people like themselves at every opportunity. I assume that "divisive woke bullshit" also covers things like personality profiling where you assess candidates for "fit" into a team. Too many people thinking the same was in an organisation can be disastrous, hence the "woke bullshit".
It should have been 3p on the 20p income tax band - clearly reversing the Ni cut.
Now I suspect the employer Ni changes would have been needed this year but by being clever last year she’s backed herself into a corner and mess of her own creation
He knows how to do retail politics.
Jenrick and Farage are both good at it.
I don't like Jenrick (painted over murals) but I suspect he is the next Tory leader.
And for people on UC working 16 hours a week, which is a great many people, HMRC will take about 100% of their earnings they work over 16 so why the hell do you expect people to work 40 hours instead of 16 in that scenario? People are rational.
Its the Laffer Curve in action. Why work more hours if you won't get paid any money for it?
And don't give that nonsense about "no quid pro quo" as the threshold freeze happened first as its not true, the freeze was due to expire and got extended as an explicit quid pro quo for the NI changes which were a tax rise.
So why still pretend there was a cut that needs to be reversed?
It creates unfairness and injustice to individuals however it's labelled.
It comes as a recent Survation poll found 22% of Tory and 19% of all voters say he would be a better leader than Badenoch (27% of Tory and 18% of all voters say the same of Jenrick and 60% of Tory and 33% of all voters say the same about Boris).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/04/cleverly-direct-challenge-badenoch-net-zero-centre-farage/
I had the same reaction to all the religious stuff around the coronation.
It is an irrational reaction. You can ignore it. It does no harm.
But I know it is hard to control an emotional reaction. It just happens.
I agree that he's next leader though and his skills at retail politics
A bloke (and it was a bloke) turned up on the call today dressed as a women and calling himself "Gemma". Whilst speaking in a deep gravelly voice and with an Adam's apple the size of a shuttlecock. He is apparently the new HR coordinator for this project.
I mean, yes, trans and identify as what you want and all that, but I find it all deeply weird.
Of course, I will now have to watch pronouns and all that jazz whenever- hopefully rarely - I have to deal with him as I'm almost guaranteed to get that wrong, because he's a bloke in drag.
And I’ve 3 things more important to handle before investigating exactly how right / wrong we are
"I love Christmas for all the reasons brilliantly articulated in Tim Minchin’s song Drinking white wine in the sun. It is a time for family, friends, excess and fun. As long as you don’t let that religious stuff spoil it it is the best time of the year".
@DavidL
I'd not heard of Tim Minchin before. Somehow a lot of life seems to pass me by, despite (maybe because of?) reading the comments here on PB on a fairly regular basis.
Anyway I googled Minchin, found the song (which I really like, being a rather sentimental soul myself) and below it there was a link to buying tickets to see him in concert. This Monday at Symphony Hall in Birmingham! Which is a 50 minute walk from where I live. I think he will have travelled over 10,000 miles from Sydney Australia to be there - so I don't think it's unreasonable that my wife and I amble 2 and a half miles from our armchairs to do our bit to make the meeting happen.
I will report back after the event.
At the same time we have had real issues with deeply entrenched racism in the police. Of racist white men being the bulk of the police force. You can't just keep hiring racists to beat up black people whilst claiming that not doing "creates more problems than it solves".
That police force called out for trying to recruit non-whites. At a surface level I agree that it's a bad look. But when its a service like the police which needs to be seen to be race neutral, what else do we do? Attack "divisive woke bullshit" like the idea of not having only racist white men policing black and asian populations? Because that's what we've had.
As you say, the next few polls will be interesting.
FoN have been essentially static for 3 weeks for everyone so any sudden movement of more than a point will be interesting
Techne have a longstanding habit of very slow but ongoing change - parties tend to drop a point a week over, say, 4 weeks or vice versa. The Tories are currently in a 'drop a point a week' pattern with them
That is a genius move, several people on final warnings before you can say "respect in the workplace".
So it is possible to have nice things
Politics also.
https://x.com/CourtNewsUK/status/1929818815753343381
76 year old Mr Price was in the early stages of dementia. He had been harassed so badly by youths in Dagenham that the local council had made the decision to board up his downstairs window.
https://x.com/MariaDodds44472/status/1930200549976051889
What is the future for oil and gas? Regardless of the political shenanigans we're on the downslope with north sea production. It is running down, it's just a question of how long we can extend the slope before it inevitably declines into irrelevance. Keep drilling - and I would issue licences based on oil & gas brought ashore and kept here. But that can't be the way forward, regardless of how many low-information voters can be gaslit.
I do this purely so I can see what Twitter’s algorithm is sending to a viewer that it knows nothing about.
Tonight, I am noticing a CLEAR shift in the algorithm.
Post after post trashing Republicans for the Big Beautiful Bill.
And post after post praising Ukraine’s military efforts.
This is unlike anything I have ever seen before.
The algorithm is usually filled with Charlie Kirk, various XRP scams, and some pro Trump AI slop.
None of that tonight.
Very interesting.
Elon’s definitely put his hand on the scale.
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1930119542111391796
There has been a little positive discrimination in that they actively want girls to be involved. Had they not involved themselves in "divisive woke bullshit" then we'd positively exclude my daughter and other future engineers from the industry because its for blokes love.
Her future career will sink or swim on her experience and expertise - you don't positively hire people who aren't qualified who then kill people because of DEI. But you do need to positively try and engage from the people who otherwise get excluded by white men.
"Would you like your house to be warmer and your bills to be lower". No, that's divisive woke nonsense
"Would you like to tell Putin to sod off and make a load of money for Britain which makes your bills lower." Yeah
The genius of the alt-right is that they are persuading people sat in cold houses that cutting their energy bills will cost them money.
(the etymology of the term is interesting - had the play/film been later we might talk about dimmerswitching or similar!)
Breaking in doors takes skill( hit the damn thing in the right place!) and the kit is very heavy, and you'll soon get tired if you mess up the first couple of goes.
What's wrong with letting the male copper do what he's probably better at than the female copper on that raid, rather than watch the female officer get tired and embarrassed?
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/greta-thunberg-aboard-gaza-flotilla-doing-nothing-not-option
Negative brand:
Stop flying
Stop eating meat
Turn the heating down
Etc
Aimed at individuals to stop doing things
Positive brand:
Make cars more fuel efficient
Insulate homes
Move to renewable energy supply
Etc
Aimed at businesses, reducing cost of living
(Note careful use of words and sentence construction!)
For your information, positive discrimination is illegal in the UK; targets are not.
Where did you do your legal training again?
Almost certainly.
By 2035 - not really.
There's many examples of that already happening. The problem is the zealots on either side.
She's not dealing with Brits or Swedes here, but the Israelis who've boarded such vessels in the past and killed activists (unfortunately and with regret etc.)
This isn't a game. I hope she turns around.
@WSJ
To state the obvious, this is exactly the opposite of what Trump’s tariffs were aiming to do.
WSJ: Automakers Race to Find Workaround to China’s Stranglehold on Rare-Earth Magnets
https://x.com/kyleichan/status/1930098051814723900
Trump 47 will go down as the worst president in US history.