How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
Nobody has a clue where we will be in 2028/29
Yes, I can easily see a parliament which has reform as largest party and LDs second, narrowly ahead of Labour
To do this, the LDs should put Rejoin in their manifesto
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
Nobody has a clue where we will be in 2028/29
Yes, I can easily see a parliament which has reform as largest party and LDs second, narrowly ahead of Labour
To do this, the LDs should put Rejoin in their manifesto
Indeed: if the Conservatives stick with Kemi, and Labour with Keir, then it's entirely possible.
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
Nobody has a clue where we will be in 2028/29
True of course. This is a betting site. My intuitions (guesses): the next election will be fought mostly between two parties with national presence, as usual.
The Tories are squeezed out of relevance both from Reform and from LD/Lab/NOTA/DK. They have given away their USP.
Reform (or Reform pacted with Tories) will be one of the parties of the two.
There are no other candidates to be the other one, so it's Labour.
That article mentions "Labour Future". I'd never heard of it so I did a bit of Googling (it doesn't have a wikipedia page). It seems to be a sockpuppet of Blue Labour, having the ineffable Maurice Glasman in both
I find Glasman pretty effable. Apart from anything else he’s in cahoots with McSweeney and their version of Labour seems to falling apart at the seams. Also invited to Trump’s inauguration, definite sign of a wrong ‘un. Waxed lyrical about Starmer’s master stroke of pulling out the royal invite for Trump Istr.
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
Nobody has a clue where we will be in 2028/29
Yes, I can easily see a parliament which has reform as largest party and LDs second, narrowly ahead of Labour
To do this, the LDs should put Rejoin in their manifesto
Indeed: if the Conservatives stick with Kemi, and Labour with Keir, then it's entirely possible.
Labour’s vote is easily as splinter-able as the Tories
1. They can shed votes to the nats AND Reform in Scotland 2. Ditto plaid and reform in wales 3. They can lose well heeled England to the LDs - esp if the LDs go full fat rejoin 4. They can shed the red wall to reform - and any wall really 5. They have the Muslim/hard left attacking urban seats 6. The greens could grab a few as well
That’s a pretty potent and toxic cocktail. It is entirely conceivable that voters decide both main parties should die
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
Home Office staff are concerned about the “absurd” decision to ban Palestine Action under UK anti-terrorism laws, a senior civil servant has said.
“My colleagues and I were shocked by the announcement,” they said. “All week, the office has been a very tense atmosphere, charged with concern about treating a non-violent protest group the same as actual terrorist organisations like Isis, and the dangerous precedent this sets.
“From desk to desk, colleagues are exchanging concerned and bemused conversations about how absurd this is and how impossible it will be to enforce. Are they really going to prosecute as terrorists everyone who expresses support for Palestine Action’s work to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel as it commits war crimes?
“It’s ridiculous and it’s being widely condemned in anxious conversations internally as a blatant misuse of anti-terror laws for political purposes to clamp down on protests which are affecting the profits of arms companies.”
I would have totally sympathised with this view UNTIL the stories came out about a) their sabotaging of arms for Ukraine and b) their pro-Putin backer.
It seems like only last week we were told of PA's Iranian money.
At the time, what I could see of social media was very angry at the PA plane stunt and split between calling it terrorism or even treason.
Now I am no hotshot lawyer like Keir Starmer or even Rob Jenrick but istm it is hard to call painting or even destroying planes terrorism but easy to call it treason.
Why is it hard to call it terrorism? Would it be terrorism if a bomb had been used to cause the criminal damage?
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
So it turns out there's still a sizeable number of Labour MPs demanding more concessions to the benefits bill. Whether it's enough to see it defeated, difficult to say but looks like still some fun and games to play out on Monday and Tuesday. Feeling like the government can't even get a compromise right.
Utter shambles of a government. The inkjet printer of administrations
They do two things kind of OK and then the third time the paper jams and the ink cartridge explodes and weird plastic flaps fall off and then the motor starts smouldering, potentially burning the house down, and all you wanted to do was print a 2 page pdf
What are these two things they do OK?
lol
I was trying to be generous
Actually I was being unfair, if you work in the public sector they have done ok on giving you a decent pay rise or if you are tiny overseas country looking for a deal for some Islands you have never controlled, they have done more than ok for you.
I work in the public sector and my pay rises have been no better than under the previous government. That was another set of expectations they set only to wheedle out. So there are big chunks of the public sector - seriously! - also disillusioned with Lab.
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
How long is the ride?
(Also: the Royal Society Summer Exhibition has an "artwork" that consists of about 100 dead rats.)
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
You fly commercial?
I know....don't say it too loudly, I even have to fly coach sometimes..yuck.
I have been fortune enough to do the private plane thing a couple of times and I fully understand why the likes of top pro golfers, who have to fly to a different location every week, use them.
So it turns out there's still a sizeable number of Labour MPs demanding more concessions to the benefits bill. Whether it's enough to see it defeated, difficult to say but looks like still some fun and games to play out on Monday and Tuesday. Feeling like the government can't even get a compromise right.
Utter shambles of a government. The inkjet printer of administrations
They do two things kind of OK and then the third time the paper jams and the ink cartridge explodes and weird plastic flaps fall off and then the motor starts smouldering, potentially burning the house down, and all you wanted to do was print a 2 page pdf
What are these two things they do OK?
lol
I was trying to be generous
Actually I was being unfair, if you work in the public sector they have done ok on giving you a decent pay rise or if you are tiny overseas country looking for a deal for some Islands you have never controlled, they have done more than ok for you.
I work in the public sector and my pay rises have been no better than under the previous government. That was another set of expectations they set only to wheedle out. So there are big chunks of the public sector - seriously! - also disillusioned with Lab.
My understanding is the teacher pay rises announced aren't properly funding, so that shit will hit the fan in due course.
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
"When a gamekeeper kills a rodent, he hangs them on the farmers fence to firstly entice more prey birds to the area, and also so that they will come and eat the mice/rat/rodents in his fields so his crops survive and he can get the highest yield.
In days gone by, this technique was also used by gamekeepers to show how many pests had been killed, as the farmer would pay per kill. This isn't the case anymore, and the pests are hung up solely to attract birds of prey to the area."
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
You fly commercial?
I know....don't say it too loudly, I even have to fly coach sometimes..yuck.
I have been fortune enough to do the private plane thing a couple of times and I fully understand why the likes of top pro golfers, who have to fly to a different location every week, use them.
Warren Buffett once gave a speech to graduating students:
“If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically… we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen… we live in a house that’s warm in winter and cool in summer… the only thing we do is we travel differently.”
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
I disagree - the current Conservative party is the least conservative and most right-wing it's been in my lifetime. It needs to get back to its roots instead of all the populist nationalist nonsense it's currently obsessed by.
Either way I won't vote for it, but it needs to attract people like my late mother who were conservative to their finger tips but voting LD because the Tories were so awful.
“Either way I won’t vote for it”
That’s all you need to say. Because it makes the rest of your comments pointless and we can skip them
Same applies to your comments about Labour then.
He can’t say that, can he? He voted Labour last year.
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
A warm rat infested welcome to near my part of the world. The rats are not there to warn the rats; they are there to warn the cyclists. And if you think your route is remote, try the road - a favourite of mine - from Greenhead to Langholm. Allegedly the B6318 it's actually a lengthy cross country slalom track. The mighty Bewcastle cross is just off the route.
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
You fly commercial?
I know....don't say it too loudly, I even have to fly coach sometimes..yuck.
I have been fortune enough to do the private plane thing a couple of times and I fully understand why the likes of top pro golfers, who have to fly to a different location every week, use them.
Warren Buffett once gave a speech to graduating students:
“If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically… we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen… we live in a house that’s warm in winter and cool in summer… the only thing we do is we travel differently.”
That was a different age, when graduate students wouldn't be ashamed of going to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen.
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
That sounds like a comment straight off of ConHome.
As if the biggest problem the Tories have right now is how right wing to be?
They f****d up on protecting our borders. They put us through years of Brexit psychodrama for no discernible benefit whatsoever. The water industry is f****d. Our railways are f****d. The housing market is f****d. The health service is on its knees, many local councils are heading for bankruptcy, the justice system and prisons are in crisis, our schools are falling apart. Levelling up came to nothing, HS2 is a shambles, low level crime was overtly ignored. And despite all the cuts the budget wasnt balanced and we remain as much in debt as ever. They even failed on defence.
It doesn’t matter how right wing you are if nothing you do ever works. Except pandering to pensioners and lining the pockets of Tory grifters.
They destroyed both their brand and their reputation. Problem is while Ratner had H Samuel that he could promote and rebrand, the Tory party has a competitor in its market and no ability to quietly rebrand
Today I learned that in Ottoman Egypt there was a truiy bizarre Berber tribe (found in and around the Middle Egyptian town of Akhmim). Known as the “noiq-chegwana”, they had their own peculiar form of Berber language, their own syncretic/pagan beliefs, suffused with witchcraft - and they also had enormous penises growing out of their heads that looked like the late TV presenter Keith Chegwin
Hence the etymology of the their name. It literally means “the holy sons of chegwin”
"For our English and Maths exam, we needed 77 rooms! 54 rooms for individuals to sit alone.. they are saying they are too anxious to take the exam in a room with everyone else"
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
Indeed. True luxury is being replaced by a faux luxe naffness - across the world
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
Nah, there's disappointment all the way up. Have done Singapore's Private Room, Cathay's Pier, Qantas F lounge in Sydney... still the same effort to get a decent pot of tea and a fry-up and then just be left alone.
With two Labour governments, working together for the people of Wales, we will deliver a brighter future for everyone.
The structure of the tweaks are so weird. Just looking back, the structure of these have definitely changed, whoever writes them used to write in full sentences, not short slogans.
e.g. When I came into office, I promised that I would serve our veterans as they have served us. It’s the least they deserve given the sacrifices they have made. That’s why my government is ensuring homes will be there for heroes across the UK.
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
You fly commercial?
I know....don't say it too loudly, I even have to fly coach sometimes..yuck.
I have been fortune enough to do the private plane thing a couple of times and I fully understand why the likes of top pro golfers, who have to fly to a different location every week, use them.
Warren Buffett once gave a speech to graduating students:
“If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically… we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen… we live in a house that’s warm in winter and cool in summer… the only thing we do is we travel differently.”
That was a different age, when graduate students wouldn't be ashamed of going to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen.
Errr: the McDonalds in most college towns are pretty busy.
"For our English and Maths exam, we needed 77 rooms! 54 rooms for individuals to sit alone.. they are saying they are too anxious to take the exam in a room with everyone else"
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
You fly commercial?
I know....don't say it too loudly, I even have to fly coach sometimes..yuck.
I have been fortune enough to do the private plane thing a couple of times and I fully understand why the likes of top pro golfers, who have to fly to a different location every week, use them.
Warren Buffett once gave a speech to graduating students:
“If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically… we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen… we live in a house that’s warm in winter and cool in summer… the only thing we do is we travel differently.”
That was a different age, when graduate students wouldn't be ashamed of going to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen.
Errr: the McDonalds in most college towns are pretty busy.
How are college kids affording $15-20 McDonalds?
Never a fan of McDonalds, especially not when In'N'Out and Five Guys exist. But Diary Queen, we all know its not proper ice cream, but it is guilty pleasure.
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
You fly commercial?
I know....don't say it too loudly, I even have to fly coach sometimes..yuck.
I have been fortune enough to do the private plane thing a couple of times and I fully understand why the likes of top pro golfers, who have to fly to a different location every week, use them.
Warren Buffett once gave a speech to graduating students:
“If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically… we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen… we live in a house that’s warm in winter and cool in summer… the only thing we do is we travel differently.”
That was a different age, when graduate students wouldn't be ashamed of going to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen.
Errr: the McDonalds in most college towns are pretty busy.
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
Hope the ride goes well!
I've seen the rats thing before, and have photos of similar. AIUI it is so gamekeepers can show landowners they've been busy (and justify their pay...), and also to serve as potential food for birds of prey, which will then attack other rodents in the field. Therefore it's something mainly done in non-shooting farmland.
Also done with moles and other vermin.
Yes, it can be a little creepy. But not as creepy as a doll's head I saw sitting on top of a fencepost, with a pair of woman's pants nailed halfway down the post...
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
Indeed. True luxury is being replaced by a faux luxe naffness - across the world
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
Nah, there's disappointment all the way up. Have done Singapore's Private Room, Cathay's Pier, Qantas F lounge in Sydney... still the same effort to get a decent pot of tea and a fry-up and then just be left alone.
All I ask for is a vast and opulent range of the world’s finest wines. And a sashimi station. And a caviar shack. And happy finish massage rooms staffed by 19 year old female Kyrgyz gymnasts
Is that too much to ask?? What’s happened to the world
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
Indeed. True luxury is being replaced by a faux luxe naffness - across the world
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
Nah, there's disappointment all the way up. Have done Singapore's Private Room, Cathay's Pier, Qantas F lounge in Sydney... still the same effort to get a decent pot of tea and a fry-up and then just be left alone.
All I ask for is a vast and opulent range of the world’s finest wines. And a sashimi station. And a caviar shack. And happy finish massage rooms staffed by 19 year old female Kyrgyz gymnasts
Is that too much to ask?? What’s happened to the world
The Kyrgyz gymnasts complained about the pervy old men.
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
Indeed. True luxury is being replaced by a faux luxe naffness - across the world
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
Nah, there's disappointment all the way up. Have done Singapore's Private Room, Cathay's Pier, Qantas F lounge in Sydney... still the same effort to get a decent pot of tea and a fry-up and then just be left alone.
All I ask for is a vast and opulent range of the world’s finest wines. And a sashimi station. And a caviar shack. And happy finish massage rooms staffed by 19 year old female Kyrgyz gymnasts
Is that too much to ask?? What’s happened to the world
The Kyrgyz gymnasts complained about the pervy old men.
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
A warm rat infested welcome to near my part of the world. The rats are not there to warn the rats; they are there to warn the cyclists. And if you think your route is remote, try the road - a favourite of mine - from Greenhead to Langholm. Allegedly the B6318 it's actually a lengthy cross country slalom track. The mighty Bewcastle cross is just off the route.
They aren't rats, they are moles. You are paid by the mole so you string them up so the farmer can see how many you have caught and so how much you are worth. It is a form of payment by results. When I was a kid it was 6d each, it think it is about £5 now.
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Utter rubbish.
Conservatives across Reform and the Tories have realised that the state itself underlies the UK's decline and that elected Governments of any colour will not succeed in doing anything remotely worthwhile whilst the Blair and Brown 'reforms' remain on the statute book, and potentially (see Cummings) whilst the Civil Service (Treasury, Cabinet office) remains in its current 1850 format. Labour and the Lib Dems are completely beholden to those systems and 'anti-radical' in that sense. They have no answers to today's issues beyond tinkering, because even if they wanted to do more than tinker, a judicial review, ECHR law, piece of Cabinet Office 'advice' , environment agency ruling, etc etc etc would stop them. They are hundreds of miles off the pace.
Thanks. Good effort. Questions: 1) How do you know. Are there links to Reform and Tory policy documents which illustrate this, and how they are going to get it done?
2) If you mark their homework, how did that project get on under the Tories from 2010 to 2024, where does it stand now only one year on, and why did the electorate reject it so decisively?
3) How did the Cummings project get on and what are its fruits?
3) What reasons do you have for thinking these are policies for government rather than policies for opposition?
1. How do I know it needs to happen, or how do I know that the Tories and Reform will sort it? I assume the second, to which the answer is I don't know, but I do know that both are saying they will, and a debate over how and how much needs to be done is gripping both parties. In the status quo parties (and I would include the Nationalists here), serious reform of the state (let alone its reduction) is utterly off the table. So I'll take the least worst option.
2. This wasn't a project under the Tories.
3. There wasn't a project under Cummings. He worked within the system, to my knowledge he never proposed to reform the state during his time at Number 10.
4. We'll see if political reform is in the manifestos won't we? I think we will see a Great Repeal Bill, undoing much of the Blair damage to our constitution, very early on. Both Reform and the Tories have moved toward this stance, and they're right to do so, because everything that people want - sorting immigration, building more houses, getting energy costs down, getting economic growth - depends on a legal, regulatory and administrative environment that we don't have at the moment.
Politics has sped up, and the consequences of failure are quicker than ever. Most Labour MPs will be out of a job come the next election. If they don't manage get this stuff changed, the Reform (and possibly Tory) MPs elected in their stead will also fail, and also face speedy electoral defeat. I don't think they want that.
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
A warm rat infested welcome to near my part of the world. The rats are not there to warn the rats; they are there to warn the cyclists. And if you think your route is remote, try the road - a favourite of mine - from Greenhead to Langholm. Allegedly the B6318 it's actually a lengthy cross country slalom track. The mighty Bewcastle cross is just off the route.
They aren't rats, they are moles. You are paid by the mole so you string them up so the farmer can see how many you have caught and so how much you are worth. It is a form of payment by results. When I was a kid it was 6d each, it think it is about £5 now.
When I was a little kid my dad always gave them to me, I had a box of 47 which I took some persuading NOT to take to show to my mates at school !
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
Hope the ride goes well!
I've seen the rats thing before, and have photos of similar. AIUI it is so gamekeepers can show landowners they've been busy (and justify their pay...), and also to serve as potential food for birds of prey, which will then attack other rodents in the field. Therefore it's something mainly done in non-shooting farmland.
Also done with moles and other vermin.
Yes, it can be a little creepy. But not as creepy as a doll's head I saw sitting on top of a fencepost, with a pair of woman's pants nailed halfway down the post...
I've seen the moles in Derbyshire. Risks being repeated in Devon if the little bugger that was in the field decides to stay put under our lawn!
The countryside is brilliant for creepy random stuff. I guess you wouldn't notice it in a city.
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
How long is the ride?
(Also: the Royal Society Summer Exhibition has an "artwork" that consists of about 100 dead rats.)
According to t'internet, that's 111 miles of cycling - albeit reasonably flat, there's a little bit less than 1,000 meters of vertical.
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
Hope the ride goes well!
I've seen the rats thing before, and have photos of similar. AIUI it is so gamekeepers can show landowners they've been busy (and justify their pay...), and also to serve as potential food for birds of prey, which will then attack other rodents in the field. Therefore it's something mainly done in non-shooting farmland.
Also done with moles and other vermin.
Yes, it can be a little creepy. But not as creepy as a doll's head I saw sitting on top of a fencepost, with a pair of woman's pants nailed halfway down the post...
Mannequins in the “witch’s market” of Chiclayo, northern Peru
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
Indeed. True luxury is being replaced by a faux luxe naffness - across the world
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
If you want the better travelling experience, do as a friend of mine did, forget Mr/Dr/Sir and tick "Prince" as your title on the frequent flyer scheme drop-down menu...
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
'Aft'noon pb from Greenhead, Northumberland. I am attempting to cycle from coast to coast of England - from Rockcliffe, near Carlisle, where the Eden turns tidal to Wylam, Northumberland, where the Tyne turns tidal. If things go very well I may continue to Newcastle. If things go badly I may get a train earlier. I'm sure a dozen pb-ers have done bigger and better rides, but if all goes to plan this will be the furthest I have ridden in a day. The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up. Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
A warm rat infested welcome to near my part of the world. The rats are not there to warn the rats; they are there to warn the cyclists. And if you think your route is remote, try the road - a favourite of mine - from Greenhead to Langholm. Allegedly the B6318 it's actually a lengthy cross country slalom track. The mighty Bewcastle cross is just off the route.
They aren't rats, they are moles. You are paid by the mole so you string them up so the farmer can see how many you have caught and so how much you are worth. It is a form of payment by results. When I was a kid it was 6d each, it think it is about £5 now.
I've seen it done with crows on N.Uist which I dislike as they're beautiful, intelligent birds. They go for the lambs i guess.
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
Yet how many of the SPAD class are regretting throwing their lot in with Labour? The giant majority meant very few will get noticed for advancement. They'l just have to stay on lose their seat in four years. It will be Thing on their CVs. But then they will talk to the former Tory MPs who lost in 2024 - and discover it means damn all in the real world. Probably marks you down.
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
Yet how many of the SPAD class are regretting throwing their lot in with Labour? The giant majority meant very few will get noticed for advancement. They'l just have to stay on lose their seat in four years. It will be Thing on their CVs. But then they will talk to the former Tory MPs who lost in 2024 - and discover it means damn all in the real world. Probably marks you down.
Very few of the LibDems defeated in 2015 have stood again. Davey is an exception.
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
Indeed. True luxury is being replaced by a faux luxe naffness - across the world
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
Nah, there's disappointment all the way up. Have done Singapore's Private Room, Cathay's Pier, Qantas F lounge in Sydney... still the same effort to get a decent pot of tea and a fry-up and then just be left alone.
The plaza lounge in T4 was ok yesterday - the only battle was protecting the window seat next to mine form a person who wanted it even though the occupant had left his bags to go to the loo
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
No policy was more emblematic of losing touch with Mondeo Man than David Cameron making it the law to give 0.7% of GDP in foreign aid.
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
Yet how many of the SPAD class are regretting throwing their lot in with Labour? The giant majority meant very few will get noticed for advancement. They'l just have to stay on lose their seat in four years. It will be Thing on their CVs. But then they will talk to the former Tory MPs who lost in 2024 - and discover it means damn all in the real world. Probably marks you down.
Very few of the LibDems defeated in 2015 have stood again. Davey is an exception.
That chap in St Ives stood every year. I admired his persistence. If not his sense.
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
A lot of feelgood Thatcherism- privatisation and council house selloffs- were strictly one-off boosts. It didn't look leave much room for a second act, and the Conservatives have struggled for a popular big idea ever since.
The other problem is the way parties in general, and the Conservatives in particular, are funded. If your income mostly depends on shadowy squillionaires, it can't help but colour your worldview.
I don’t agree that Palestine Action are a “terrorist” organisation.
The anti-terror laws are, perhaps rightly, very oppressive. They should be used sparingly. This is another overreach from the Home Office.
On the other hand, I would not have been scandalised had the vandals been shot by troops in their attempt to sabotage the planes.
Am the only person who holds this opinion?
I think I'd rather they weren't shot, but, given what Ukraine did to Russia, I'd like to think it would be harder than that to get at our aircraft.
But, I agree with your sentiment that the organisation isn't a terrorist organisation, but those that got at the aircraft should have the book thrown at them. I'd do them for treason.
I don’t agree that Palestine Action are a “terrorist” organisation.
The anti-terror laws are, perhaps rightly, very oppressive. They should be used sparingly. This is another overreach from the Home Office.
On the other hand, I would not have been scandalised had the vandals been shot by troops in their attempt to sabotage the planes.
Am the only person who holds this opinion?
I tend to agree: the hurdle for banning things needs to be high. On the other hand, people who break into military bases and destroy things are - at the very least - guilty of serious criminal offences.
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
The Tories fell in love with the myth of Thatcher. She is their folk hero. Everything they have done since has to be seen in the context of her downfall. The next generation of Tories idolised her without understanding her (see Truss, Liz).
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
Meanwhile, in "Brenda from Bristol would have something to say about this" news,
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Tory minister George Freeman refers himself to parliamentary watchdog after leaked emails reveal he was paid by a company that helped him write questions to government
When Johnson saw Walter Cronkite's damning report from Khe Sanh, he apparently said "if I've lost Cronkite I've just lost middle-America". If Starmer has lost John Rentoul, it really is all over.
I think I was one of the first to spot that he was a diabolical combination of uncharismatic berk and sociopathic liar.
The truth is there are fewer Labour supporters under Starmer than there have been for years. This was so even at the time of the last election. The right splitting between Tory, Reform and Stay at Home and a quirk of our Electoral system just gave Labour spinners the opportunity to pretend Sir Keir was really popular.
Think I’ve said this before, but it’s like a team winning the Premier League on 57 points by winning every home game 1-0, losing every away game 5-0 while every other match in the season was a draw. They’d win the league by 18 points, and that could be spun as some kind of impressive feat if you ignored the fact they’d lost half their matches, had a negative goal difference and won the league with the lowest points total of any champions in history.
And yet, they still get their name engraved on the trophy.
Two things can be true at once. One is that Starmer is not a Great PM. The reason that Starmer Fans never popped up to explain his poor polling is that there aren't (m)any.
The other is that the options proffered by other parties are obviously, visibly even worse. See the head-to-head polling on preferred PM; SKS wins each one fairly comfortably, despite everything. But "none of the above/someone else" generally does even better.
"Vote Starmer. He'll have to do, because the others are even worse." Not an inspiring slogan, but it's won once and may well win again. All those who would like something else have to do is find something inspiring and credible to put up against him as an alternative. It's that simple, but it also seems to be that impossible.
This is not actually true
C4’s Dispatches about Farage by Fraser Nelson had a Survation poll where Farage topped the list as preferred PM
No one scored highly. But Farage scored highest
That's why I said head-to-head.
Reform and Farage do have the biggest single slice of the electoral pie right now. But they are the second choice of very few. See the polling by YouGov;
Labour may be in a lacklustre second place in the voting intention polls, and suffering from low approval ratings, but when the public are offered the choice of Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage as prime minister, the incumbent holds a commanding lead over the challenger by 44% to 29%.
Without a decent wedge of "I don't like X, but I want to stop Y" votes, Reform are currently on "not enough". FPTP has always been a mixture of positive and negative votes, and having five parties turns that effect up to 11.
I predict even Starmer’s head to head performance will crater over time. Indeed it will get so bad he will step down
Moreover the Tories are inevitably going to replace Badenoch. If they have the sense to install Jenrick - energetic, clever, ruthless, tiny, good at social media - he could also prosper against the lifeless pathetic Sir Keir Traitor
Jenrick would take more votes from Farage than Starmer
For gods sake tell them to choose Jenrick. He’s your only hope. The only Tory with ideas and vigour and chutzpah
If you choose cleverly or stride or whatever you are accepting terminal decline and irrelevance
Indeed: Jenrick could rescue the Conservatives. He's telegenic, vigarous, youthful (without appearing to still be an undergraduate), and can appeal to at least some Reform supporters, without scaring off traditional Conservatives.
Yes exactly
He’s the only one that makes you sit up and think OK perhaps he will do something. Maybe I’ll give them another shot
He’s proved that with Jenrickvision. The fact he alienates the lefty centrist dad Lib Dem Tories is an ADVANTAGE. They are the people who will lead the Tories into oblivion - they’ve already taken them halfway there
I always thought Badenoch would be useless, but she is the right choice if the only alternative is Jenrick. (Tory MPs- you are culpable here). He is just too dodgy personally, although I do recognise his strengths as you've outlined.
The other weakness to Jenrick is - if he's copying Reform, why not just vote for the real thing? And by fishing from the same pool he loses the centre without necessarily gaining anything in return.
If I was a Conservative I would be utterly depressed. Instead I'm watching with amazement as the most successful political party ever falls apart. I would laugh but the alternative is Farage and the chancers in Reform, and I never thought I would say this, so the Conservative party needs to survive somehow. Don't ask me how they do it.
The Conservatives *are* the real thing. The only reason Reform exists at all is because the Tories have been infested with Lib Dems who ran an aggressive campaign (and still are) to cleanse the party of any right-wing thought and turn it into the social democratic party: blue team. It is a farce that the same weasels now turn round and say 'we shouldn't ape reform'.
Try putting a description to 'Conservative' thought and policy right now that is 'right-wing' or 'non social democratic'. The answer has to clearly mark it out from Lab or LDs. It cannot be done.
I don't think it can be done with Reform either, but that is a work in progress.
Of course it can
It is the greatest mystery as to how the Tories evolved from the Thatcher version to the Boris Johnson one. The party lost touch with Mondeo Man massively. Key mistakes were made by people such as Jeremy Hunt, Pritti Patel and Sajid Javeed. It is hard to look back and come up with any positives from their last 5 years of government yet they still pretend they are the natural heirs to Labour. The alarm bells should be ringing much louder
Yet how many of the SPAD class are regretting throwing their lot in with Labour? The giant majority meant very few will get noticed for advancement. They'l just have to stay on lose their seat in four years. It will be Thing on their CVs. But then they will talk to the former Tory MPs who lost in 2024 - and discover it means damn all in the real world. Probably marks you down.
Very few of the LibDems defeated in 2015 have stood again. Davey is an exception.
That chap in St Ives stood every year. I admired his persistence. If not his sense.
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
I don’t agree that Palestine Action are a “terrorist” organisation.
The anti-terror laws are, perhaps rightly, very oppressive. They should be used sparingly. This is another overreach from the Home Office.
On the other hand, I would not have been scandalised had the vandals been shot by troops in their attempt to sabotage the planes.
Am the only person who holds this opinion?
I agree with that. The British establishment seems obsessed with legal process to the detriment of actually doing anything. They believe making new laws is action in and of itself, when all they have to do is enforce laws we already have
Same goes for the boat people. Firm action turning some back would probably end loads of them. Yes there is a risk people might die but then these people knowingly take these risks to invade the country illegally
Meanwhile, in "Brenda from Bristol would have something to say about this" news,
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Tory minister George Freeman refers himself to parliamentary watchdog after leaked emails reveal he was paid by a company that helped him write questions to government
I don’t agree that Palestine Action are a “terrorist” organisation.
The anti-terror laws are, perhaps rightly, very oppressive. They should be used sparingly. This is another overreach from the Home Office.
On the other hand, I would not have been scandalised had the vandals been shot by troops in their attempt to sabotage the planes.
Am the only person who holds this opinion?
Anyone breaking into a military base and attempting the cause damage should expect to get a bullet for their trouble.
Are PA terrorists? It's probably a reasonable fit for what they've done, imho, because intruding on MoD property and damaging an aircraft worth hundreds of millions is closer to treason than terrorism but no government is going to jump for a treason charge these days.
I don’t agree that Palestine Action are a “terrorist” organisation.
The anti-terror laws are, perhaps rightly, very oppressive. They should be used sparingly. This is another overreach from the Home Office.
On the other hand, I would not have been scandalised had the vandals been shot by troops in their attempt to sabotage the planes.
Am the only person who holds this opinion?
I tend to agree: the hurdle for banning things needs to be high. On the other hand, people who break into military bases and destroy things are - at the very least - guilty of serious criminal offences.
The problem is that the state is unsure of its own legitimacy, so treason gets redefined as terrorism to spare it the embarrassment of standing up for itself.
How does Starmer come back from all of this? I do not see a route. There is literally no returning
Unless he gets some weird Falklands black swan, the British public have decided they despise him and that’s that. What’s worse - it looks like most of his MPs and half his cabinet despise him as well
I'm not sure he's long for the job. If things haven't improved by 2026, they'll start to panic (these aren't a strong and stable cohort of MPs, on recent evidence).
Of course, that then begs the question who comes after him. Quite difficult to see beyond Our Ange (who brings with her, her own baggage). Streeting is too Blairite for them and Reeves has ruined her political career.
Next May's Holyrood and Senedd elections may well see Badenoch's resignation and big questions for Starmer
It's quite possible the it will further Tory disintegration, yes. What is unlikely - in a way quite sad - is that both Tory and Labour will hit 'crisis absolute' at the same time. Our system requires two national parties to be in the ring. Change is that really would be radical. The LDs are not going to be the other one apart from Reform. That's the sad bit. The Tories won't be the other one.
Which leaves us in Sherlock Holmes land: 'once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth'.
Only Labour can be the national party remaining in the ring with Reform. No other candidates.
If (!!) my argument is right, then the Tories only future (apart from sensibly being One Nation again) is a pact with Reform.
Why should Labour be the only one in the ring anymore than the end of the conservative party
I’m in the plaza lounge at T2 thanks to the grovelling airline
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
Most airports lounges in the West are a total scam these days. They let the riff raff in and have cost engineered them to the gills.
Indeed. True luxury is being replaced by a faux luxe naffness - across the world
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
Nah, there's disappointment all the way up. Have done Singapore's Private Room, Cathay's Pier, Qantas F lounge in Sydney... still the same effort to get a decent pot of tea and a fry-up and then just be left alone.
The plaza lounge in T4 was ok yesterday - the only battle was protecting the window seat next to mine form a person who wanted it even though the occupant had left his bags to go to the loo
Only one I've been in recently was the JAL one in Haneda airport. If I'd paid for it I might havd been disappointed -- but JAL give you free access if you're taking the 00:20 flight as compensation for their not serving an inflight dinner on that flight, and the free lounge buffet was vastly better than an inflight economy meal, so I thought it was great...
I’m sitting on the waterfront at Oslo watching the floating saunas - which look like sheds on a raft - buzzing about. It seems a popular way to spend a couple of hours.
I’m sitting on the waterfront at Oslo watching the floating saunas - which look like sheds on a raft - buzzing about. It seems a popular way to spend a couple of hours.
I’m sitting on the waterfront at Oslo watching the floating saunas - which look like sheds on a raft - buzzing about. It seems a popular way to spend a couple of hours.
Sounds much better than Heathrow.
Given that my new replacement flight is now late, which potentially means a missed connection in Frankfurt, and an even greater clusterfucktacular, yes, I’d say @IanB2 is in the nicer place
Home Office staff are concerned about the “absurd” decision to ban Palestine Action under UK anti-terrorism laws, a senior civil servant has said.
“My colleagues and I were shocked by the announcement,” they said. “All week, the office has been a very tense atmosphere, charged with concern about treating a non-violent protest group the same as actual terrorist organisations like Isis, and the dangerous precedent this sets.
“From desk to desk, colleagues are exchanging concerned and bemused conversations about how absurd this is and how impossible it will be to enforce. Are they really going to prosecute as terrorists everyone who expresses support for Palestine Action’s work to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel as it commits war crimes?
“It’s ridiculous and it’s being widely condemned in anxious conversations internally as a blatant misuse of anti-terror laws for political purposes to clamp down on protests which are affecting the profits of arms companies.”
I would have totally sympathised with this view UNTIL the stories came out about a) their sabotaging of arms for Ukraine and b) their pro-Putin backer.
It seems like only last week we were told of PA's Iranian money.
At the time, what I could see of social media was very angry at the PA plane stunt and split between calling it terrorism or even treason.
Now I am no hotshot lawyer like Keir Starmer or even Rob Jenrick but istm it is hard to call painting or even destroying planes terrorism but easy to call it treason.
Why is it hard to call it terrorism? Would it be terrorism if a bomb had been used to cause the criminal damage?
Who is terrorised? And that is why it would be different if PA were running around setting off bombs. Even if what they did is legally defined as terrorism, is it in the common use of the term?
Meanwhile, in "Brenda from Bristol would have something to say about this" news,
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Tory minister George Freeman refers himself to parliamentary watchdog after leaked emails reveal he was paid by a company that helped him write questions to government
Meanwhile, in "Brenda from Bristol would have something to say about this" news,
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Tory minister George Freeman refers himself to parliamentary watchdog after leaked emails reveal he was paid by a company that helped him write questions to government
I love oysters. They are big in New York. But are they one of those things (like driving, or golf, or having sex) that Gen Z are giving up on?
Too squishy, too odd.
Perhaps that’s why they closed the oyster bar at T2.
I investigated. Apparently they made a profit but not enough. People at oyster bars pay premium prices but it seems they linger… and chat….
You make more money with yet another sandwich bar or a burger joint where no one stays long. Sad
Oysters are also a biggish thing in london. Lots of new places opening. So it’s not a lack of appetite
More crapification / squeezing every last possible drop out of everything.
Annoying because I prefer indeed to go to an oyster bar than the horrible lounges with their pisspoor food offer and vague ambience of passive aggression.
Comments
To do this, the LDs should put Rejoin in their manifesto
The Tories are squeezed out of relevance both from Reform and from LD/Lab/NOTA/DK. They have given away their USP.
Reform (or Reform pacted with Tories) will be one of the parties of the two.
There are no other candidates to be the other one, so it's Labour.
I’m floating in a zen-fused cocoon of calm
*if I wasn’t I would indeed have kicked off by now
Also invited to Trump’s inauguration, definite sign of a wrong ‘un. Waxed lyrical about Starmer’s master stroke of pulling out the royal invite for Trump Istr.
1. They can shed votes to the nats AND Reform in Scotland
2. Ditto plaid and reform in wales
3. They can lose well heeled England to the LDs - esp if the LDs go full fat rejoin
4. They can shed the red wall to reform - and any wall really
5. They have the Muslim/hard left attacking urban seats
6. The greens could grab a few as well
That’s a pretty potent and toxic cocktail. It is entirely conceivable that voters decide both main parties should die
It’s certainly suits me. They both deserve to die
If you want to pay to come In here it’s £36 AN HOUR
Who the fuck pays that for dismal sandwiches, Lidl cheese and tiny thimbles of execrable wine?
It’s been a while since I walked into a lounge and thought Wow
Even the lounges in the gulf and east Asia are a bit disappointing. I guess if you actually go FIRST it gets better. Haven’t done that for a while
The weather is mizzly and I have a cold and a bad back. But opportunities of a day to myself are few and far between and must be seized when they crop up.
Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to something I saw just west of Gilsland: 100 dead rats hung from a fence; the heavy smell of death echoing the bleakness of the setting. Why, for God's sake? A warning to other rats?
I bet it's quite nice up here in the sun.
That was another set of expectations they set only to wheedle out. So there are big chunks of the public sector - seriously! - also disillusioned with Lab.
(Also: the Royal Society Summer Exhibition has an "artwork" that consists of about 100 dead rats.)
I have been fortune enough to do the private plane thing a couple of times and I fully understand why the likes of top pro golfers, who have to fly to a different location every week, use them.
In days gone by, this technique was also used by gamekeepers to show how many pests had been killed, as the farmer would pay per kill. This isn't the case anymore, and the pests are hung up solely to attract birds of prey to the area."
https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/2051817
“If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically… we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen… we live in a house that’s warm in winter and cool in summer… the only thing we do is we travel differently.”
Hence the etymology of the their name. It literally means “the holy sons of chegwin”
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1938925340841087177
A stronger union.
A richer country.
Better opportunities.
With two Labour governments, working together for the people of Wales, we will deliver a brighter future for everyone.
https://x.com/tombennett71/status/1938674722566287703
"For our English and Maths exam, we needed 77 rooms! 54 rooms for individuals to sit alone.. they are saying they are too anxious to take the exam in a room with everyone else"
crush the lesser races
conquer the Galaxy
unimaginable power
unlimited rice pudding...
e.g. When I came into office, I promised that I would serve our veterans as they have served us. It’s the least they deserve given the sacrifices they have made. That’s why my government is ensuring homes will be there for heroes across the UK.
How the heck did someone like that ever become a barrister ?
Never a fan of McDonalds, especially not when In'N'Out and Five Guys exist. But Diary Queen, we all know its not proper ice cream, but it is guilty pleasure.
I've seen the rats thing before, and have photos of similar. AIUI it is so gamekeepers can show landowners they've been busy (and justify their pay...), and also to serve as potential food for birds of prey, which will then attack other rodents in the field. Therefore it's something mainly done in non-shooting farmland.
Also done with moles and other vermin.
Yes, it can be a little creepy. But not as creepy as a doll's head I saw sitting on top of a fencepost, with a pair of woman's pants nailed halfway down the post...
Is that too much to ask?? What’s happened to the world
2. This wasn't a project under the Tories.
3. There wasn't a project under Cummings. He worked within the system, to my knowledge he never proposed to reform the state during his time at Number 10.
4. We'll see if political reform is in the manifestos won't we? I think we will see a Great Repeal Bill, undoing much of the Blair damage to our constitution, very early on. Both Reform and the Tories have moved toward this stance, and they're right to do so, because everything that people want - sorting immigration, building more houses, getting energy costs down, getting economic growth - depends on a legal, regulatory and administrative environment that we don't have at the moment.
Politics has sped up, and the consequences of failure are quicker than ever. Most Labour MPs will be out of a job come the next election. If they don't manage get this stuff changed, the Reform (and possibly Tory) MPs elected in their stead will also fail, and also face speedy electoral defeat. I don't think they want that.
The countryside is brilliant for creepy random stuff. I guess you wouldn't notice it in a city.
Otherwise, I suppose, from the grave I might get to choose my constituency.
The anti-terror laws are, perhaps rightly, very oppressive. They should be used sparingly. This is another overreach from the Home Office.
On the other hand, I should not have been scandalised had the vandals been shot by troops in their attempt to sabotage the planes.
Am the only person who holds this opinion?
The other problem is the way parties in general, and the Conservatives in particular, are funded. If your income mostly depends on shadowy squillionaires, it can't help but colour your worldview.
But, I agree with your sentiment that the organisation isn't a terrorist organisation, but those that got at the aircraft should have the book thrown at them. I'd do them for treason.
🔺 EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Tory minister George Freeman refers himself to parliamentary watchdog after leaked emails reveal he was paid by a company that helped him write questions to government
https://bsky.app/profile/thetimes.com/post/3lsob4lj6ub2s
If so, you could be keeping the same MP!
Same goes for the boat people. Firm action turning some back would probably end loads of them. Yes there is a risk people might die but then these people knowingly take these risks to invade the country illegally
But are they one of those things (like driving, or golf, or having sex) that Gen Z are giving up on?
Too squishy, too odd.
Perhaps that’s why they closed the oyster bar at T2.
Are PA terrorists? It's probably a reasonable fit for what they've done, imho, because intruding on MoD property and damaging an aircraft worth hundreds of millions is closer to treason than terrorism but no government is going to jump for a treason charge these days.
You make more money with yet another sandwich bar or a burger joint where no one stays long. Sad
Oysters are also a biggish thing in london. Lots of new places opening. So it’s not a lack of appetite
🤬😢
“The future? The future for Soul II Soul?
A funky bass
A happy face
For a loving race
Peace”
“Jazzie’s Groove” I think