Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
I thought he wore an Omega these days? Because James Bond can be bought....
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
I thought he wore an Omega these days? Because James Bond can be bought....
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Its laughable all the claims about having to tax private school VAT for £1bn or WFP cuts saving £2-3bn, then we borrow billions more than forecast in just one month. And the interest payments on our debt alone every month is now £16bn.
It is inevitable that the return to historically normal rates of interest from the rock bottom that lasted 15 years from the GFC would cause economic stress to the over borrowed, whether governments, businesses or individuals.
It is however good for the other party to a borrowing transaction. Savers are getting a real return again, and improved gilt yields have made DC pensions much more viable.
Ultimately it is an economic good, though I am glad that I paid off my mortgage while the rates were so low.
When touring China years ago you could get a Rolex for a dollar. But I had one.
In Tiananmen Square we took a liking to the kites flying there and negotiated the purchase again for a dollar.
As we were walking away the vendor asked if we wanted string with the kite - for a dollar.
I remember buying a fake Rolex (one of the cleaner, plainer versions) in Singapore in 1993 for a few dollars. Worked fine, and looked right except that the second hand clicked round rather than sweeping continuously. Worked as my watch for at least five years until my partner bought me a Raymond Neil, which I still have and still works, except for the little date window that gets stuck in the high 20s.
Some of the knock-offs available now can be incredibly good. The Chinese make $1000 "super-clone" that require a real expert to spot they are fake both outside and in. I believe the $200 available in places like Turkey are lesser quality but still actually good watches i.e. they have automatic movements, but they are Japanese rather than Swiss.
I have heard of people buying the $1000 clones to wear in public while they store their genuine one away in a vault, so if they do get robbed they lose the clone.
I buy and sell Panerais (though i have done a few Rolex in my time) and the only way I could be 100% sure on a Super Clone is to remove the rear case. However, it's very rare for somebody to attempt to pass off an SC as the real article because the cloners never get the Panerai boxes even remotely correct and any serious collector/dealer isn't going to buy without box or papers.
About the Rolex ad. Anyone paying for advertising would want to see the A/B tests against the target demographic (in the past). Now any old s**t gets pushed out on TikTok to see what gets clicks.
Does anyone know how to get the demographic of Bots?
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
If we go down some element of co-payments route then starting with GP seems most sensible. Plenty of exemptions for the poor etc.
Perhaps it is time for some kind of royal commission to look at nhs funding?
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
Between Reform and Corbyn's new I Can't Believe It's Not Communism party, there's a credible chance the next election might have bucketloads of seats for two appalling options.
Labour and the Conservatives need to up their game, or they (especially the latter, of course) will end up consigned to insignificance.
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Introducing additional bureaucracy to assess eligibility for free treatment and collect payment isn't going to increase the % of funding spent on treatment. We have all the international data we need to compare the different funding models. No one pushing charging models ever says "X has an insurance scheme so they pay less per capita for a similar standard of care." We need healthier lifestyles.
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Was not one of the reasons for prescription fees being partly abolished that they did not really pay for themselves?
(Not sure on the detailed numbers, but I do think it is at least marginal, and I have seen the case made that in Scotland the change saved money, and improved efficiency, so NHS Scotland money was spent on medical services not paperwork.)
Perhaps our Scottish colleagues can advise? The change has been in since 2011, so we should have some data somewhere.
Perhaps the politics of Gradgrind are not everything .
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
Rolex now make over a million watches a year. They really aren't that exclusive now. Hence why TSE says people who go on Concorde if it was still running wouldn't be wearing one.
There are of course Rolex's and there are Rolex's (and I don't mean the Chinese fakes).
I am clearly not their market, but I really cannot fathom this fashion for ridiculously expensive watches. I do have a Garmin smartwatch, but otherwise just check the time on my phone.
I suppose that it is as simple as my mother puts it "There's always been folk with more money than sense"
I had to suppress my laughter when a nurse looked at her phone to tell the time, ignoring the watch pinned to her uniform. It is probably best not to laugh at the medical team when they are about to shove things up your bum.
But it does also support your point that no-one needs a £10,000 watch which keeps better time than a £100 watch because both are outmatched by a phone.
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Seems to me they should first put right that horrible cliff edge cut-off from benefits. If your income is £1 over the limit, you lose out on hundreds of pounds worth of top-ups.
If they were able to transform that into a sliding scale, it seems to me that small charges would become acceptable to a lot of peoples. An example is NHS dentistry. The problem there is finding an NHS dentist, but if you have one you do pay a small amount, depending on the type of treatment.
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
In Casino Royale James Bond drove a Ford Mondeo ...
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
Rolex now make over a million watches a year. They really aren't that exclusive now. Hence why TSE says people who go on Concorde if it was still running wouldn't be wearing one.
There are of course Rolex's and there are Rolex's (and I don't mean the Chinese fakes).
I am clearly not their market, but I really cannot fathom this fashion for ridiculously expensive watches. I do have a Garmin smartwatch, but otherwise just check the time on my phone.
I suppose that it is as simple as my mother puts it "There's always been folk with more money than sense"
I had to suppress my laughter when a nurse looked at her phone to tell the time, ignoring the watch pinned to her uniform. It is probably best not to laugh at the medical team when they are about to shove things up your bum.
But it does also support your point that no-one needs a £10,000 watch which keeps better time than a £100 watch because both are outmatched by a phone.
A couple of decades ago I had a mini-colonoscopy (to try and find bowel cancer, luckily there was none). Through it, the doctor kept saying things to, presumably, reassure me. "You're doing really well" etc.
All I could think (as a twentysomething) was that I was being complimented by a middle-aged man on how well I took it up the arse. It was an effort not to laugh.
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
Breitlings are quite cheap and very badly displayed, as Jeremy Clarkson explains in this one-minute video shot in their Cambodian outlet:- https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3-RE9ECAM7g
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
In Casino Royale James Bond drove a Ford Mondeo ...
Government largesse on company Aston Martins is why we are in the financial doodoo.
Reeves might means test the triple lock but certainly won't charge for NHS treatment. Most likely more tax rises are coming with an increase in capital gains tax and reduction in tax relief on pensions contributions
Of course Labour should do these things, and of course the public will hate it as a result.
We have got ourselves in the position where our politicians dare not do what is right for fear of the electorate. If the Labour Government felt it had to backtrack on a simple modest and sensible policy like the abolition of the WFA, what chance it will end the Triple Lock? What chance other sacred cows will be butchered?
This is a fix of our own making. We won't get out of it untilthe electorate grows up a bit. A change in the voting system might help, but I'm afraid we have to live with it until there is no alternative.
A comment I can wholeheartedly agree with.
I voted Labour last year and I would have far more respect if they did what was right for the country and take the electoral hit, who knows in 4 years they may even get credit for it.
At the very least means test both the triple lock and access to the NHS (eg GP appointments, prescriptions for OAPs), toughen up the benefits system and merge NI & Income tax so a well off pensioner pays the same as a worker with a mortgage. Anyone can see that we are hurtling down the road to financial disaster but the electorate just breezes on merrily wanting more of everything paid for by the mythical "somebody else".
If Labour did suddenly find the balls to do the right things would the Tories or Reform go into the next election pledging to repeal them? One of our problems is that across the board (Badenoch, Farage, Corbyn, Starmer) we do not have a single leader with the gravitas to turn the ship around. Plan for a financial calamity would be my advice.
The odds of Labour charging for NHS treatment are approximately the same as the odds of Trump having a lucid moment, Elon Musk having a second's self-awareness or @Leon being sober at one minute past six on Friday night.
I don’t mind being called a drunk, indeed I often label myself as such for the bantz
But for the interests of veracity, these days I am tediously sober. Quite often I don’t drink at all; when I do it’s rarely enough to get me more than tipsy
It’s the Mounjaro, you see. Puts you off the booze
Sometimes it’s quite boring. But it’s a necessary break for my liver
At some point the can can't be kicked any longer, unless magical mega growth appears. It is just who is going to take this step, a UK politician or the IMF.
I know George is popular in these parts. But he was a long term catastrophe. Failed to cut the bloated current budget while he had a golden chance to do so, instead opting for the politically easier capital budget. Cosied up to the Chinese communists. Failed to sort out energy supply. And landed us with the indefinite triple lock, which almost certainly means I’ll never see my national insurance contributions returned as a state pension. And as for that pasty thing…
IMO, bottling the chance to combine IC + NI was a big mistake.
No, NI should be ringfenced to cover the state pension and JSA and some healthcare
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
If we go down some element of co-payments route then starting with GP seems most sensible. Plenty of exemptions for the poor etc.
Perhaps it is time for some kind of royal commission to look at nhs funding?
An awful lot of GPs' time is spent managing chronic conditions, so plenty of repeat visits, or infants and young children where we might not necessarily want to deter seeking medical aid (and vaccines!).
When boris kicked out the rebels, the Tory brand remained very strong
The Tory brand has never recovered
Yeah, he trashed it into a majority of 80.
What a catastrophe.
It was the remainer Truss that trashed it, not Boris.
Just because you WANT something to be true, doesn't mean it actually IS.
Just because you FEAR something might be true, doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Putting Johnson into the top job was a catastrophic mistake, done for short-term self-interested party political reasons that were clearly spelled out to us at the time by our HY, but leading to disastrous consequences for both the party and our country as was also spelled out very clearly at the time by many others including me.
Wrong on all counts.
Boris beat Corbyn, Boris got Brexit done and when Boris resigned the Conservatives were polling at least 10% higher than they are now
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
In Casino Royale James Bond drove a Ford Mondeo ...
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
If we go down some element of co-payments route then starting with GP seems most sensible. Plenty of exemptions for the poor etc.
Perhaps it is time for some kind of royal commission to look at nhs funding?
We have a co-payment/subsidy model. Once you have worked here for 6 months the govt subsidises GP appointments, so for example I pay £40 and the gov pays just over £50 to the surgery. All aspects of GP services are arranged the same way so for example if you need a nurse in the surgery it will cost you but also subsidised, and repeat prescriptions would cost me £13. You also pay for x-rays and scans (non emergency or outside of surgery).
It’s all free if you are not working or under 18 or over 18 but in full time education here or at a recognised UK uni or similar.
I don’t know whether this model would work in the UK but might help ease the strain on budgets.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
When boris kicked out the rebels, the Tory brand remained very strong
The Tory brand has never recovered
Yeah, he trashed it into a majority of 80.
What a catastrophe.
It was the remainer Truss that trashed it, not Boris.
Just because you WANT something to be true, doesn't mean it actually IS.
Just because you FEAR something might be true, doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Putting Johnson into the top job was a catastrophic mistake, done for short-term self-interested party political reasons that were clearly spelled out to us at the time by our HY, but leading to disastrous consequences for both the party and our country as was also spelled out very clearly at the time by many others including me.
Wrong on all counts.
Boris beat Corbyn, Boris got Brexit done and when Boris resigned the Conservatives were polling at least 10% higher than they are now
Boris flubbed it. The only person he has to blame for not being PM today is himself.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
Rolex now make over a million watches a year. They really aren't that exclusive now. Hence why TSE says people who go on Concorde if it was still running wouldn't be wearing one.
There are of course Rolex's and there are Rolex's (and I don't mean the Chinese fakes).
I am clearly not their market, but I really cannot fathom this fashion for ridiculously expensive watches. I do have a Garmin smartwatch, but otherwise just check the time on my phone.
I suppose that it is as simple as my mother puts it "There's always been folk with more money than sense"
I realised recently that you - and your many neurodiverse brethren on PB - have absolutely no Theory of Mind. You cannot put yourself in the mind of another (as you actually admit, here)
This is not a critique. I have several great friends and family members that are spectrum-y. But it does explain some of your more ludicrous statements
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
If we go down some element of co-payments route then starting with GP seems most sensible. Plenty of exemptions for the poor etc.
Perhaps it is time for some kind of royal commission to look at nhs funding?
An awful lot of GPs' time is spent managing chronic conditions, so plenty of repeat visits, or infants and young children where we might not necessarily want to deter seeking medical aid (and vaccines!).
These days that tends to be specialist or generalist nurses in the main in GP surgeries, and they dominant the routine care of chronic conditions.
Only the difficult or unusual features will be referred to a Doctor.
(That's based on experience in England, primarily around Diabetes for 25 years.)
Still, it could be worse for Reeves, she could be overseeing the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, which has been epically messed up by the Diocese of Canterbury,
The rules state that a local diocesan committee (the Vacancy in See Committee, or VISC) elects three people to send to the CNC from among its own members.
After Welby announced his resignation in December, the Canterbury VISC swung into action. Their three-year term of office elapsed at the end of 2024, so plans were already underway to handover to the new VISC elected to serve 2025-28.
However, in January 2025, somebody realised the original VISC committee had been selected illegitimately due to a misunderstanding way back in 2022, so it had to be junked. To add to the confusion, the second VISC had been elected on the explicit understanding that it would not be involved in the Welby succession, which everyone then assumed was being handled by the old VISC.
So, unbelievably, the Diocese of Canterbury decided to elect a third VISC. In February, officials in Canterbury re-opened nominations. However, in the middle of these elections, the General Synod met and changed the rules. Despite the election already being underway, the diocese decided to implement the new criteria immediately.
There were a dizzying array of restrictions, trying to balance the VISC membership to include a certain number of women, lay people, and members of each district in the Diocese of Canterbury. As a result, some people were guaranteed to be elected while others could never win. To compound the chaos, they botched the counting of the votes.
The CofE then failed to explain any of the problems publicly for many weeks, allowing conspiracy theories to flourish. Conservatives and evangelicals worried that progressives were trying to fiddle the results to get more of their supporters onto the VISC - and eventually onto the CNC.
In one infamous example, an evangelical vicar who got ten votes lost out to a liberal who only got one. This was possible because of the complicated new rules but it appeared from the outside that conservatives were being disenfranchised unfairly.
Eventually, several weeks later, the diocese quietly admitted it had bungled the elections and scrapped the committee entirely. Now it has begun the process of electing yet another VISC, the fourth in just a few months.
When boris kicked out the rebels, the Tory brand remained very strong
The Tory brand has never recovered
Yeah, he trashed it into a majority of 80.
What a catastrophe.
It was the remainer Truss that trashed it, not Boris.
Just because you WANT something to be true, doesn't mean it actually IS.
Just because you FEAR something might be true, doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Putting Johnson into the top job was a catastrophic mistake, done for short-term self-interested party political reasons that were clearly spelled out to us at the time by our HY, but leading to disastrous consequences for both the party and our country as was also spelled out very clearly at the time by many others including me.
Wrong on all counts.
Boris beat Corbyn, Boris got Brexit done and when Boris resigned the Conservatives were polling at least 10% higher than they are now
That river in Egypt is indeed hot at this time of year.
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
Still, it could be worse for Reeves, she could be overseeing the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, which has been epically messed up by the Diocese of Canterbury,
The rules state that a local diocesan committee (the Vacancy in See Committee, or VISC) elects three people to send to the CNC from among its own members.
After Welby announced his resignation in December, the Canterbury VISC swung into action. Their three-year term of office elapsed at the end of 2024, so plans were already underway to handover to the new VISC elected to serve 2025-28.
However, in January 2025, somebody realised the original VISC committee had been selected illegitimately due to a misunderstanding way back in 2022, so it had to be junked. To add to the confusion, the second VISC had been elected on the explicit understanding that it would not be involved in the Welby succession, which everyone then assumed was being handled by the old VISC.
So, unbelievably, the Diocese of Canterbury decided to elect a third VISC. In February, officials in Canterbury re-opened nominations. However, in the middle of these elections, the General Synod met and changed the rules. Despite the election already being underway, the diocese decided to implement the new criteria immediately.
There were a dizzying array of restrictions, trying to balance the VISC membership to include a certain number of women, lay people, and members of each district in the Diocese of Canterbury. As a result, some people were guaranteed to be elected while others could never win. To compound the chaos, they botched the counting of the votes.
The CofE then failed to explain any of the problems publicly for many weeks, allowing conspiracy theories to flourish. Conservatives and evangelicals worried that progressives were trying to fiddle the results to get more of their supporters onto the VISC - and eventually onto the CNC.
In one infamous example, an evangelical vicar who got ten votes lost out to a liberal who only got one. This was possible because of the complicated new rules but it appeared from the outside that conservatives were being disenfranchised unfairly.
Eventually, several weeks later, the diocese quietly admitted it had bungled the elections and scrapped the committee entirely. Now it has begun the process of electing yet another VISC, the fourth in just a few months.
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
If that happens, it will be essential that GP surgeries are fully integrated into the wider NHS. Otherwise, the fees will just be used to inflate practice profits, with no wider benefit to the NHS.
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
If we go down some element of co-payments route then starting with GP seems most sensible. Plenty of exemptions for the poor etc.
Perhaps it is time for some kind of royal commission to look at nhs funding?
An awful lot of GPs' time is spent managing chronic conditions, so plenty of repeat visits, or infants and young children where we might not necessarily want to deter seeking medical aid (and vaccines!).
These days that tends to be specialist or generalist nurses in the main in GP surgeries, and they dominant the routine care of chronic conditions.
Only the difficult or unusual features will be referred to a Doctor.
(That's based on experience in England, primarily around Diabetes for 25 years.)
Epilogue:
GPs may well be involved at the start, and it will be front-loaded as the emphasis is on identifying chronic conditions in order to manage them rather than let compications develop which cost 10x or 100x as much later on to manage (eg getting good D control, rather than supplying prosthetic legs 15 years later).
(That's based on experience in England, primarily around Diabetes for 25 years.)
Post Script:
(I'm currently trying to work out how to get an anti-Pavement Parking message into the rolling display at my local GP to change the culture, as that is where everyone goes over a period of time, hung off "Don't force disabled people & parents with prams into the road by not thinking" wrapped-up more sweetly with a "walking to the GP makes you healthy" packaging.
It seems I need to deal with the CCG or similar who supply them.)
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
£10 is 'serious money' to more than a few of my wider family.
Also, the need to arrange an appointment with a GP means that many people opt for walk-in clinics - or, I suppose, A&E.
Labour must know, even at this far remove, that winning the next election is looking unlikely. Therefore why make all of the unpopular difficult policy choices now? They might as well leave as much fucked up shit as possible for the incoming Fukker administration.
The democracy conundrum in a nutshell here. It makes sense to take unpopular decisions with a long term pay-off if you win the next election. However becoming unpopular means you probably lose it - in which case your political opponents profit from the deal all ways up. They are gifted power and once in power reap the benefits of your courage and far-sightedness. If I was Keir I would not want Nigel Farage to benefit from my courage and far-sightedness. Furthermore, given Reform would be an unutterable disaster, he has a duty as our Prime Minister to not make things easier for them electorally. Which means, just in this one special instance, putting the interests of the Labour Party above those of the country (ie doing only easy popular short-termist things) is arguably in the national interest.
Can anyone explain how Starmer's latest substitute for doing anything of real utility, airdropping supplies into Gaza, might work? Presumably amounts will be minimal, the riots by starving Palestinians will continue when they do land and there's a real chance that in the most overcrowded real estate on the planet that they'll wipe out a few folk if they land directly on top of them. Of course it might mean that the IDF take some time off from shooting up the queues at GHF aid sites to impose 'order' at these drop zones.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
Can anyone explain how Starmer's latest substitute for doing anything of real utility, airdropping supplies into Gaza, might work? Presumably amounts will be minimal, the riots by starving Palestinians will continue when they do land and there's a real chance that in the most overcrowded real estate on the planet that they'll wipe out a few folk if they land directly on top of them. Of course it might mean that the IDF take some time off from shooting up the queues at GHF aid sites to impose 'order' at these drop zones.
Well, it isn't intended to work. When did Starmer do ANYTHING which was meant to work, truly vile man
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
"There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. "
The problem is they don't differentiate between those people and the so-called wrong-un's, or even just people who were born here. Hence the hysteria over the wrong "white British" figures.
It's very hard to believe that people who screech about 'white British' or Muslims don't have a problem with your list. Because they evidently do, because they are referring to all Muslims.
Can anyone explain how Starmer's latest substitute for doing anything of real utility, airdropping supplies into Gaza, might work? Presumably amounts will be minimal, the riots by starving Palestinians will continue when they do land and there's a real chance that in the most overcrowded real estate on the planet that they'll wipe out a few folk if they land directly on top of them. Of course it might mean that the IDF take some time off from shooting up the queues at GHF aid sites to impose 'order' at these drop zones.
It is a bloody stupid idea.
If the drones are with IDF permission then why not simply deliver the weeks worth of food and other aid in trucks outside Gaza in?
If they are without IDF permission they will be shot down.
Always refreshing to start the day with some bracing Franco-Polish alt.right philosophy:
“Western Europeans don't understand that the harm they have done to their countries is IRREVERSIBLE, and their children will not forgive them for it.
“They thought they were building an open society. What they created was an unmanageable fracture. They replaced continuity with experimentation, identity with guilt, and cohesion with slogans. Entire generations were told that borders were immoral, that culture was oppressive, and that integration was optional. Now they are reaping the results — and pretending not to see them.
“The cities are divided. The schools are segregated by language and loyalty. The police avoid entire zones. Judges are intimidated. Teachers lie to survive. Religion is ridiculed unless it's imported. The native population is shrinking — and afraid. Those who speak the truth are attacked by their own institutions, while those who undermine the country are subsidized.
“Immigration was not the problem — it was the refusal to set conditions. It was the cowardice of leaders who wanted applause instead of responsibility. It was the moral blackmail of elites who despised their own people, and these people's submissiveness to their elites. What arrived was not just labor or refuge — it was a different civilization, with its own expectations, values, and plans. And no one asked it to adapt.
“The damage is not temporary. It's demographic. It's territorial. It's cultural. It's encoded now into the next hundred years. Their children will grow up in a land their parents no longer recognize — and they will ask, not with anger but disbelief: why did you allow this?”
Reeves might means test the triple lock but certainly won't charge for NHS treatment. Most likely more tax rises are coming with an increase in capital gains tax and reduction in tax relief on pensions contributions
Just pick one of the three measures and go with that.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The wilful self-delusion is off the dial, here
My first experience of Rolex was as a twenty something, went with a friend to Spain for the month between dipping and tupping and bought a smart looking watch off a market stall for a fiver and then used it as my farming watch that Winter. It was only later I heard I was attracting comment as a farmer who was wearing a Rolex when I went hedging. I hadn't even noticed. For me a watch was something to wear to tell the time with, which it did well until the catch broke and so it remains in a hedge somewhere to this day.
Can anyone explain how Starmer's latest substitute for doing anything of real utility, airdropping supplies into Gaza, might work? Presumably amounts will be minimal, the riots by starving Palestinians will continue when they do land and there's a real chance that in the most overcrowded real estate on the planet that they'll wipe out a few folk if they land directly on top of them. Of course it might mean that the IDF take some time off from shooting up the queues at GHF aid sites to impose 'order' at these drop zones.
It is a bloody stupid idea.
If the drones are with IDF permission then why not simply deliver the weeks worth of food and other aid in trucks outside Gaza in?
If they are without IDF permission they will be shot down.
God, are they proposing using drones for this? I thought it was the traditional method of sliding pallets out of the back of a Hercules. Will they be diverting vital drone resources from tracking down British fly tippers?
Still, it could be worse for Reeves, she could be overseeing the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, which has been epically messed up by the Diocese of Canterbury,
The rules state that a local diocesan committee (the Vacancy in See Committee, or VISC) elects three people to send to the CNC from among its own members.
After Welby announced his resignation in December, the Canterbury VISC swung into action. Their three-year term of office elapsed at the end of 2024, so plans were already underway to handover to the new VISC elected to serve 2025-28.
However, in January 2025, somebody realised the original VISC committee had been selected illegitimately due to a misunderstanding way back in 2022, so it had to be junked. To add to the confusion, the second VISC had been elected on the explicit understanding that it would not be involved in the Welby succession, which everyone then assumed was being handled by the old VISC.
So, unbelievably, the Diocese of Canterbury decided to elect a third VISC. In February, officials in Canterbury re-opened nominations. However, in the middle of these elections, the General Synod met and changed the rules. Despite the election already being underway, the diocese decided to implement the new criteria immediately.
There were a dizzying array of restrictions, trying to balance the VISC membership to include a certain number of women, lay people, and members of each district in the Diocese of Canterbury. As a result, some people were guaranteed to be elected while others could never win. To compound the chaos, they botched the counting of the votes.
The CofE then failed to explain any of the problems publicly for many weeks, allowing conspiracy theories to flourish. Conservatives and evangelicals worried that progressives were trying to fiddle the results to get more of their supporters onto the VISC - and eventually onto the CNC.
In one infamous example, an evangelical vicar who got ten votes lost out to a liberal who only got one. This was possible because of the complicated new rules but it appeared from the outside that conservatives were being disenfranchised unfairly.
Eventually, several weeks later, the diocese quietly admitted it had bungled the elections and scrapped the committee entirely. Now it has begun the process of electing yet another VISC, the fourth in just a few months.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
"There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. "
The problem is they don't differentiate between those people and the so-called wrong-un's, or even just people who were born here. Hence the hysteria over the wrong "white British" figures.
It's very hard to believe that people who screech about 'white British' or Muslims don't have a problem with your list. Because they evidently do, because they are referring to all Muslims.
You overuse the verb “screech”. It’s a verbal tic and it begins to irritate
Farage is such a peasant, no wonder Coutts let him go.
The elite wear Breitlings and Hublots, and potentially Patek Philippe.
My watch of choice is a Breitling as it fits my understated personality.
Apparently you can see my Breitling from the moon.
James Bond wears a Rolex...
I knew a sound recordist who wore a Rolex every day. He wasn't a very wealthy guy but he had done a job in the Middle East and the Sultan gave every member of the crew one as a gift
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
"There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. "
The problem is they don't differentiate between those people and the so-called wrong-un's, or even just people who were born here. Hence the hysteria over the wrong "white British" figures.
It's very hard to believe that people who screech about 'white British' or Muslims don't have a problem with your list. Because they evidently do, because they are referring to all Muslims.
You overuse the verb “screech”. It’s a verbal tic and it’s decidedly irritating
If you didn't SCREECH so much, I wouldn't need to use it.
Always refreshing to start the day with some bracing Franco-Polish alt.right philosophy:
“Western Europeans don't understand that the harm they have done to their countries is IRREVERSIBLE, and their children will not forgive them for it.
“They thought they were building an open society. What they created was an unmanageable fracture. They replaced continuity with experimentation, identity with guilt, and cohesion with slogans. Entire generations were told that borders were immoral, that culture was oppressive, and that integration was optional. Now they are reaping the results — and pretending not to see them.
“The cities are divided. The schools are segregated by language and loyalty. The police avoid entire zones. Judges are intimidated. Teachers lie to survive. Religion is ridiculed unless it's imported. The native population is shrinking — and afraid. Those who speak the truth are attacked by their own institutions, while those who undermine the country are subsidized.
“Immigration was not the problem — it was the refusal to set conditions. It was the cowardice of leaders who wanted applause instead of responsibility. It was the moral blackmail of elites who despised their own people, and these people's submissiveness to their elites. What arrived was not just labor or refuge — it was a different civilization, with its own expectations, values, and plans. And no one asked it to adapt.
“The damage is not temporary. It's demographic. It's territorial. It's cultural. It's encoded now into the next hundred years. Their children will grow up in a land their parents no longer recognize — and they will ask, not with anger but disbelief: why did you allow this?”
There's an interesting paradox here, which people with a bit of self-awareness might recognise.
The people most exercised by demographic change are, on average, older. The youth are mostly chill with it. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are.
In other words, it's the generation who voted for this and enacted it who are most cross about it. If I thought I had stuffed up that badly, I think I would retire to a remote hermitage to live out my life in quiet reflection of what I had got so wrong.
Always refreshing to start the day with some bracing Franco-Polish alt.right philosophy:
“Western Europeans don't understand that the harm they have done to their countries is IRREVERSIBLE, and their children will not forgive them for it.
“They thought they were building an open society. What they created was an unmanageable fracture. They replaced continuity with experimentation, identity with guilt, and cohesion with slogans. Entire generations were told that borders were immoral, that culture was oppressive, and that integration was optional. Now they are reaping the results — and pretending not to see them.
“The cities are divided. The schools are segregated by language and loyalty. The police avoid entire zones. Judges are intimidated. Teachers lie to survive. Religion is ridiculed unless it's imported. The native population is shrinking — and afraid. Those who speak the truth are attacked by their own institutions, while those who undermine the country are subsidized.
“Immigration was not the problem — it was the refusal to set conditions. It was the cowardice of leaders who wanted applause instead of responsibility. It was the moral blackmail of elites who despised their own people, and these people's submissiveness to their elites. What arrived was not just labor or refuge — it was a different civilization, with its own expectations, values, and plans. And no one asked it to adapt.
“The damage is not temporary. It's demographic. It's territorial. It's cultural. It's encoded now into the next hundred years. Their children will grow up in a land their parents no longer recognize — and they will ask, not with anger but disbelief: why did you allow this?”
Morning PB.
There is no one "different civilisation" that arrived. That is a form of paranoia. There were many different civilisations, with different characteristics.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
Post of the weekend, so far
I’ve seen this exact process on social media. People who actually have quite a judicious, balanced but sometimes critical opinion of “woke” issues - migration, race, gender, etc - get hysterically labelled as racist, TERFs, Nazis, and the rest
Eventually they give up in angry exasperation and shift completely to the right, abandoning balance and “picking a side”
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
"There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. "
The problem is they don't differentiate between those people and the so-called wrong-un's, or even just people who were born here. Hence the hysteria over the wrong "white British" figures.
It's very hard to believe that people who screech about 'white British' or Muslims don't have a problem with your list. Because they evidently do, because they are referring to all Muslims.
You overuse the verb “screech”. It’s a verbal tic and it’s decidedly irritating
If you didn't SCREECH so much, I wouldn't need to use it.
Just stop using it. Brush up your vocab. English is an enormously wealthy language: exploit it
Don’t shout at me but batting these days is way easier than 20/25 years ago! Probably twice as hard back then!
Waqar, Shoaib, Akram, Mushtaq, Kumble, Srinath, Harbhajan, Donald, Pollock, Klusener, Gough, McGrath, Lee, Warne, Gillespie, Bond, Vettori, Cairns, Vaas, Murali, Curtley, Courtney and the list could go on and on…
I’ve named 22 above. Please name me 10 modern day bowlers that can compare to the names above?
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
"There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. "
The problem is they don't differentiate between those people and the so-called wrong-un's, or even just people who were born here. Hence the hysteria over the wrong "white British" figures.
It's very hard to believe that people who screech about 'white British' or Muslims don't have a problem with your list. Because they evidently do, because they are referring to all Muslims.
You overuse the verb “screech”. It’s a verbal tic and it’s decidedly irritating
If you didn't SCREECH so much, I wouldn't need to use it.
Just stop using it. Brush up your vocab. English is an enormously wealthy language: exploit it
Always refreshing to start the day with some bracing Franco-Polish alt.right philosophy:
“Western Europeans don't understand that the harm they have done to their countries is IRREVERSIBLE, and their children will not forgive them for it.
“They thought they were building an open society. What they created was an unmanageable fracture. They replaced continuity with experimentation, identity with guilt, and cohesion with slogans. Entire generations were told that borders were immoral, that culture was oppressive, and that integration was optional. Now they are reaping the results — and pretending not to see them.
“The cities are divided. The schools are segregated by language and loyalty. The police avoid entire zones. Judges are intimidated. Teachers lie to survive. Religion is ridiculed unless it's imported. The native population is shrinking — and afraid. Those who speak the truth are attacked by their own institutions, while those who undermine the country are subsidized.
“Immigration was not the problem — it was the refusal to set conditions. It was the cowardice of leaders who wanted applause instead of responsibility. It was the moral blackmail of elites who despised their own people, and these people's submissiveness to their elites. What arrived was not just labor or refuge — it was a different civilization, with its own expectations, values, and plans. And no one asked it to adapt.
“The damage is not temporary. It's demographic. It's territorial. It's cultural. It's encoded now into the next hundred years. Their children will grow up in a land their parents no longer recognize — and they will ask, not with anger but disbelief: why did you allow this?”
There's an interesting paradox here, which people with a bit of self-awareness might recognise.
The people most exercised by demographic change are, on average, older. The youth are mostly chill with it. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are.
In other words, it's the generation who voted for this and enacted it who are most cross about it. If I thought I had stuffed up that badly, I think I would retire to a remote hermitage to live out my life in quiet reflection of what I had got so wrong.
(See also, economics and sexual ethics.)
1. You stuffed up that badly
2. Multiple polls show that the western young (under 25) are more rightwing than their elders, and this is intensifying
At the same time some are also veering hard left, but as this is traditional in Da Yoot it is less noteworthy
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
Post of the weekend, so far
I’ve seen this exact process on social media. People who actually have quite a judicious, balanced but sometimes critical opinion of “woke” issues - migration, race, gender, etc - get hysterically labelled as racist, TERFs, Nazis, and the rest
Eventually they give up in angry exasperation and shift completely to the right, abandoning balance and “picking a side”
Both the right and left are to blame for this polarisation, though. It's the currency of the times. I've also seen reasunably culturally moderate Caneroonian right-centrists called "traitors", and "self-destroyers" on Twitter. Some then head to Bluesky.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
"There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. "
The problem is they don't differentiate between those people and the so-called wrong-un's, or even just people who were born here. Hence the hysteria over the wrong "white British" figures.
It's very hard to believe that people who screech about 'white British' or Muslims don't have a problem with your list. Because they evidently do, because they are referring to all Muslims.
You overuse the verb “screech”. It’s a verbal tic and it’s decidedly irritating
If you didn't SCREECH so much, I wouldn't need to use it.
Just stop using it. Brush up your vocab. English is an enormously wealthy language: exploit it
Always refreshing to start the day with some bracing Franco-Polish alt.right philosophy:
“Western Europeans don't understand that the harm they have done to their countries is IRREVERSIBLE, and their children will not forgive them for it.
“They thought they were building an open society. What they created was an unmanageable fracture. They replaced continuity with experimentation, identity with guilt, and cohesion with slogans. Entire generations were told that borders were immoral, that culture was oppressive, and that integration was optional. Now they are reaping the results — and pretending not to see them.
“The cities are divided. The schools are segregated by language and loyalty. The police avoid entire zones. Judges are intimidated. Teachers lie to survive. Religion is ridiculed unless it's imported. The native population is shrinking — and afraid. Those who speak the truth are attacked by their own institutions, while those who undermine the country are subsidized.
“Immigration was not the problem — it was the refusal to set conditions. It was the cowardice of leaders who wanted applause instead of responsibility. It was the moral blackmail of elites who despised their own people, and these people's submissiveness to their elites. What arrived was not just labor or refuge — it was a different civilization, with its own expectations, values, and plans. And no one asked it to adapt.
“The damage is not temporary. It's demographic. It's territorial. It's cultural. It's encoded now into the next hundred years. Their children will grow up in a land their parents no longer recognize — and they will ask, not with anger but disbelief: why did you allow this?”
Morning PB.
There is no one "different civilisation" that arrived. That is a form of paranoia. There were many different civilisations, with different characteristics.
When boris kicked out the rebels, the Tory brand remained very strong
The Tory brand has never recovered
Yeah, he trashed it into a majority of 80.
What a catastrophe.
It was the remainer Truss that trashed it, not Boris.
Just because you WANT something to be true, doesn't mean it actually IS.
Just because you FEAR something might be true, doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Putting Johnson into the top job was a catastrophic mistake, done for short-term self-interested party political reasons that were clearly spelled out to us at the time by our HY, but leading to disastrous consequences for both the party and our country as was also spelled out very clearly at the time by many others including me.
Wrong on all counts.
Boris beat Corbyn, Boris got Brexit done and when Boris resigned the Conservatives were polling at least 10% higher than they are now
"When I set light to the house, only the front door was burning. The rest of the house burned down after I had left....."
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
Post of the weekend, so far
I’ve seen this exact process on social media. People who actually have quite a judicious, balanced but sometimes critical opinion of “woke” issues - migration, race, gender, etc - get hysterically labelled as racist, TERFs, Nazis, and the rest
Eventually they give up in angry exasperation and shift completely to the right, abandoning balance and “picking a side”
Both the right and left are to blame for this polarisation, though. I've also seen reasunably culturally moderate Caneroonian right-centrists called "traitors", and "self-destroyers" on Twitter. Some then head to Bluesky.
Yes that’s fair. It works both ways. Tho I think less common in the direction you describe
Always refreshing to start the day with some bracing Franco-Polish alt.right philosophy:
“Western Europeans don't understand that the harm they have done to their countries is IRREVERSIBLE, and their children will not forgive them for it.
“They thought they were building an open society. What they created was an unmanageable fracture. They replaced continuity with experimentation, identity with guilt, and cohesion with slogans. Entire generations were told that borders were immoral, that culture was oppressive, and that integration was optional. Now they are reaping the results — and pretending not to see them.
“The cities are divided. The schools are segregated by language and loyalty. The police avoid entire zones. Judges are intimidated. Teachers lie to survive. Religion is ridiculed unless it's imported. The native population is shrinking — and afraid. Those who speak the truth are attacked by their own institutions, while those who undermine the country are subsidized.
“Immigration was not the problem — it was the refusal to set conditions. It was the cowardice of leaders who wanted applause instead of responsibility. It was the moral blackmail of elites who despised their own people, and these people's submissiveness to their elites. What arrived was not just labor or refuge — it was a different civilization, with its own expectations, values, and plans. And no one asked it to adapt.
“The damage is not temporary. It's demographic. It's territorial. It's cultural. It's encoded now into the next hundred years. Their children will grow up in a land their parents no longer recognize — and they will ask, not with anger but disbelief: why did you allow this?”
Morning PB.
There is no one "different civilisation" that arrived. That is a form of paranoia. There were many different civilisations, with different characteristics.
It's essentially a rehash of Rivers of Blood.
There's often a tendency to conflate fhe unknown, or the culturally different, together. Often the stronger that is, the stronger the psychological aspect.
I don't know if anyone else has been following the French Jewish children story on the Vueling flight. Has it been covered by MSM?
Seems like the airline has a lot of questions to answer as to why 40 children were removed from the flight and the teacher was then thrown to the ground and handcuffed. For singing in Hebrew?
It's also claimed that the Captain trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Mad stuff.
No, he's just displaying his mastery of vibe campaigning.
it.
Exactly this
How can people not see this.
Nope. Tried but clearly not connecting with Rolex owners like me.
You’re not his target audience.
I don’t own a Rolex. Just an Apple Watch. I doubt many people own a Rolex
Agree. The audience is people who would like to own a Rolex and probably never will.
PS I'm not his audience and don't own a watch ( just to complicate the overlapping and not overlapping sets)
The audience is people stuck in the 1970s who still imagine a Rolex is desirable.
Rolex is a cultural short hand for aspiration and success. The average punter doesn’t have a Rolex. But they sure as hell know how little of an f the police gave when their van was broken into and the tools of their livelihood were stolen. The meme works also for the latter middle aged parent that gets a bit of a shiver by the characters they encounter when they visit their 20-something kids in the edgy bits of town.
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
At the risk of offending all the PB Rolex-wearers, I'd tend to regard people who need "bling" (and I include Rolexes) as a sign of their own importance to be the kind who would feel a need to put a shuttlecock down their trousers, or say misbehave in a motor vehicle (loud exhaust, traffic light race, shiny sports car etc), to convince themselves, their friends and perhaps 'the ladies' how important they are. It's a stance devoid of any class.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
The British are generally a tolerant, easy going bunch. There aren’t that many here who have any problem at all with our Muslim shop keepers, taxi driverss, doctors or even (gasp) lawyers. What an increasing percentage are uncomfortable with is the admittance of uneducated rural peasants from some of the roughest parts on earth. Many of whom have entered illegally and not carrying ID.
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
(Aside: I would not regard myself as being on the left. When I was in political blogging I was always called "Right Leaning". For a label now I would probably reach for 'orange booker' or 'liberal wing of conservative'. But that's one for debate another time.)
I'd regard "most people have little personal experience of Muslims" as simply being an observed reality in many areas, which leaves the political opportunity open for such a narrative. It may not be a comfortable thing to say, Nonetheless, that is the (dishonest) narrative deliberately being driven, and partially why - in my assessment - it is getting some response. Dynamic are different in say Bradford or some areas of London.
That imo is also why I can observe GB News starting a piece talking about "Islamist" (ie specifically the 'political Islam' movement), and then a couple of sentences later switching to "Islamic"; they wish to smear all Muslims with charges that are valid only for a very small minority.
That is Lee Anderson's chosen narrative in his inflammatory tweet which generated the demonstration, including his "this rape was by an asylum seeker" claim. This is despite there being no source other than him that has made that claim - it was not in the police statement. If he has it from his conversations with the Notts Police, I do not know. There was other untrue material in his tweet. And he has form for "provocation before accuracy".
Chatting to people who were on or around the Ashfield demonstration last night, they were talking about "Asylum Seekers", and extending it to "get them all out". The narrative has an impact. Equally in the Active Patriot FB group I linked last night.
The facts around rape are that 6/7 of rapes / assault by penetration committed on women are by acquaintances or friends/relations, not by strangers. So 1/7 are by strangers, and a small subset of that by "Asylum Seekers".
But Lee Anderson (my MP) does not talk about rape publicly (that I have heard) unless it lets him stir up loathing of Muslims or "asylum seekers" or "illegal immigrants". He and his ilk are far more frequently using rape as a lever to promote their own wedge politics than they are in dealing with rape as it actually exists.
I'm probably off for a bit now, but will review later.
I don't know if anyone else has been following the French Jewish children story on the Vueling flight. Has it been covered by MSM?
Seems like the airline has a lot of questions to answer as to why 40 children were removed from the flight and the teacher was then thrown to the ground and handcuffed. For singing in Hebrew?
It's also claimed that the Captain trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Mad stuff.
I don't know if anyone else has been following the French Jewish children story on the Vueling flight. Has it been covered by MSM?
Seems like the airline has a lot of questions to answer as to why 40 children were removed from the flight and the teacher was then thrown to the ground and handcuffed. For singing in Hebrew?
It's also claimed that the Captain trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Mad stuff.
The claim was they were singing about death to all Arabs. Could this be similar to the case in London where the Jewish kids on the bus were attacked and it was claimed they had said a load of racist stuff, but they were speaking Hebrew and not saying anything of the sort?
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
You would need to introduce a whole structure to take payments, which itself would cost money. It would dissuade some people with real medical needs, whose worsening problems would only cost the NHS more down the line. The difficulty of getting a GP appointment and some vigorous triaging to alternatives already filters out most time-wasters.
Presumably any such system would work similarly to that for prescription fees, where the people who need lots of prescriptions (elderly, pregnancy, chronic disease) or who struggle to pay (on income support) are exempted. At which point, of course, the amount raised is greatly reduced as those are the people who need lots of GP appointments/prescriptions! 89% of prescriptions (England figures) are dispensed for free. If the same applied to GP appointments... and GPs see about 25 patients per day each... you would be raising about £28 per day per GP. Which is peanuts.
You could tweak who pays prescription fees (although of course it would be unpopular with voters). You don't currently pay if you are over 60. You could increase that to the retirement age. You don't pay if you are 16 or under, but there's no strong argument to exempt 13-16 year olds.
Or we could just pay a bit more in tax. People in France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Italy etc. do and it works fine.
Can anyone explain how Starmer's latest substitute for doing anything of real utility, airdropping supplies into Gaza, might work? Presumably amounts will be minimal, the riots by starving Palestinians will continue when they do land and there's a real chance that in the most overcrowded real estate on the planet that they'll wipe out a few folk if they land directly on top of them. Of course it might mean that the IDF take some time off from shooting up the queues at GHF aid sites to impose 'order' at these drop zones.
It is a bloody stupid idea.
If the drones are with IDF permission then why not simply deliver the weeks worth of food and other aid in trucks outside Gaza in?
If they are without IDF permission they will be shot down.
If it actually happens, which I doubt, the IDF shooting down British drones delivering aid would ratchet up the pressure on the Israeli government, in Europe at least.
Isn't knighthood a living honour, and therefore cannot be bestowed upon the dead, nor removed from them (as it expired upon their death)?
The story acknowledged that Jack Hobbs was already a "Sir" before his only remaining 6 was 6 feet under; the headline was somewhat provoking and meant "they should both have knighthoods now".
I don't know if anyone else has been following the French Jewish children story on the Vueling flight. Has it been covered by MSM?
Seems like the airline has a lot of questions to answer as to why 40 children were removed from the flight and the teacher was then thrown to the ground and handcuffed. For singing in Hebrew?
It's also claimed that the Captain trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Mad stuff.
The claim was they were singing about death to all Arabs. Could this be similar to the case in London where the Jewish kids on the bus were attacked and it was claimed they had said a load of racist stuff, but they were speaking Hebrew and not saying anything of the sort?
No footage of anything at all - other than the female teacher being handcuffed on the ground.
The revealing thing about the kids on the bus story as I remember it was that the media needed to explain why the attackers had been provoked. Pure Jew hatred wasn't a good enough motive.
Charging for the NHS is mental but at least the IMF have recognised where all the money is going. Too much of our debate is about relatively paltry amounts of cash going on changes to PIP, WFP etc etc, even while by the far the biggest area of spending - health - continues to rocket up.
Is charging for the NHS "mental"? I paid prescription fees for years until at 60 they became free.
Can the NHS continue as a soley funded from tax institution? Looking increasing unreal.
Charging people serious money when they are badly ill would be insidious and wrong; no-one wants to see the tide of medical bankruptcies that they have in the US.
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
You would need to introduce a whole structure to take payments, which itself would cost money. It would dissuade some people with real medical needs, whose worsening problems would only cost the NHS more down the line. The difficulty of getting a GP appointment and some vigorous triaging to alternatives already filters out most time-wasters.
Presumably any such system would work similarly to that for prescription fees, where the people who need lots of prescriptions (elderly, pregnancy, chronic disease) or who struggle to pay (on income support) are exempted. At which point, of course, the amount raised is greatly reduced as those are the people who need lots of GP appointments/prescriptions! 89% of prescriptions (England figures) are dispensed for free. If the same applied to GP appointments... and GPs see about 25 patients per day each... you would be raising about £28 per day per GP. Which is peanuts.
You could tweak who pays prescription fees (although of course it would be unpopular with voters). You don't currently pay if you are over 60. You could increase that to the retirement age. You don't pay if you are 16 or under, but there's no strong argument to exempt 13-16 year olds.
Or we could just pay a bit more in tax. People in France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Italy etc. do and it works fine.
A penny on tax for the NHS. Oh wait, the Lib Dems tried that.
I don't know if anyone else has been following the French Jewish children story on the Vueling flight. Has it been covered by MSM?
Seems like the airline has a lot of questions to answer as to why 40 children were removed from the flight and the teacher was then thrown to the ground and handcuffed. For singing in Hebrew?
It's also claimed that the Captain trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Mad stuff.
Anybody got a link to claims they will use drones to deliver aid into Gaza, because it sounds moronic.
Stella Creasy was advocating it on C4 news last night. I don't think it government policy.
A bit daft of her, who I usually rate very highly.
Stella Creasy was once touted as a future prime minister after her early success on payday loans, and also page 3 and her abortion rights campaign. Then she lost it over Corbyn and the magic has never returned.
I've just been to the Palladium to see Rachel Zegler singing Don't Cry for me Argentina from the outside balcony. A warm sunny evening. A massive crowd. Everyone smiling and clapping. London is like a box of chocolates. All sizes, ages and colours. Enjoying themselves together ❤️. Magic
No, get with the programme. We are supposed to be on the verge of civil war.
Is this not just a continuation of the trend of recent years? Those of us fortunate enough to insulate ourselves from the worst features of this country do so. And on the whole we have a jolly old time, because there is so much about our country and culture that is amazing. We put fingers in the ears to how unbearable life can be at the fringes of society.
The difference we’re seeing now is that the problems which have affected a couple of northern towns beginning with R, are crashing into the places where the middle class opinion formers live like Epping, and where they work, like Canary Wharf. So all of a sudden, the thing we are not allowed to talk about is becoming the thing that is being talked about rather lot out there in the real world.
Some people in Gaza are starving. Israel blames the UN. The UN blames Israel. everyone sides with the UN. Why?
No-one asks about the role of Hamas who to be fair are honest enough to admit that they have no responsibility for making sure the Gazans don't starve.
Comments
Charging people £10 to see their GP probably makes sense, not so much as an income generator but to deal with the people who waste their GP’s time whenever they have a cold or sprained ankle, so freeing up capacity for the rest of us.
https://x.com/SophyRidgeSky/status/1949017329334890690
Daniel Craig wears Omega
James Bond wears Rolex...
It is however good for the other party to a borrowing transaction. Savers are getting a real return again, and improved gilt yields have made DC pensions much more viable.
Ultimately it is an economic good, though I am glad that I paid off my mortgage while the rates were so low.
Does anyone know how to get the demographic of Bots?
The thing that worries me most personally is what happens if / when Farage proves he doesn’t have the will or wit to deliver the things his backers want. Musk: “This guy doesn’t have what it takes”. Musk is one of the greatest hirers of talent on earth and took a pass at Nige after the interview. Unless Farage can get the right people to join, I suspect his govt will last three months before floundering. To be replaced by what…
Perhaps it is time for some kind of royal commission to look at nhs funding?
Labour and the Conservatives need to up their game, or they (especially the latter, of course) will end up consigned to insignificance.
We have all the international data we need to compare the different funding models. No one pushing charging models ever says "X has an insurance scheme so they pay less per capita for a similar standard of care."
We need healthier lifestyles.
(Not sure on the detailed numbers, but I do think it is at least marginal, and I have seen the case made that in Scotland the change saved money, and improved efficiency, so NHS Scotland money was spent on medical services not paperwork.)
Perhaps our Scottish colleagues can advise? The change has been in since 2011, so we should have some data somewhere.
Perhaps the politics of Gradgrind are not everything
But it does also support your point that no-one needs a £10,000 watch which keeps better time than a £100 watch because both are outmatched by a phone.
If they were able to transform that into a sliding scale, it seems to me that small charges would become acceptable to a lot of peoples. An example is NHS dentistry. The problem there is finding an NHS dentist, but if you have one you do pay a small amount, depending on the type of treatment.
All I could think (as a twentysomething) was that I was being complimented by a middle-aged man on how well I took it up the arse. It was an effort not to laugh.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3-RE9ECAM7g
I voted Labour last year and I would have far more respect if they did what was right for the country and take the electoral hit, who knows in 4 years they may even get credit for it.
At the very least means test both the triple lock and access to the NHS (eg GP appointments, prescriptions for OAPs), toughen up the benefits system and merge NI & Income tax so a well off pensioner pays the same as a worker with a mortgage. Anyone can see that we are hurtling down the road to financial disaster but the electorate just breezes on merrily wanting more of everything paid for by the mythical "somebody else".
If Labour did suddenly find the balls to do the right things would the Tories or Reform go into the next election pledging to repeal them? One of our problems is that across the board (Badenoch, Farage, Corbyn, Starmer) we do not have a single leader with the gravitas to turn the ship around. Plan for a financial calamity would be my advice.
But for the interests of veracity, these days I am tediously sober. Quite often I don’t drink at all; when I do it’s rarely enough to get me more than tipsy
It’s the Mounjaro, you see. Puts you off the booze
Sometimes it’s quite boring. But it’s a necessary break for my liver
Boris beat Corbyn, Boris got Brexit done and when Boris resigned the Conservatives were polling at least 10% higher than they are now
It’s all free if you are not working or under 18 or over 18 but in full time education here or at a recognised UK uni or similar.
I don’t know whether this model would work in the UK but might help ease the strain on budgets.
As with Farage, imo it's valuable to flip the script, and attach value to things that are more important.
With Farage, Anderson, and now some on the right of the Conservative Party, their politics has become a politics of fear and loathing, which are being adopted from the further (choose your word) Right.
One interesting insight is that the people who appeared on the streets of Ashfield the other particularly day to promote hatred of Muslims, and try and stir up locals in the same beliefs, are unlikely to have ever met any normal, everyday Muslims - so are easier to gull.
That's the type of cultural script that needs to be flipped. I don't see whether that will happen; it's another reason Mr Starmer needs to fix his comms.
Police say only one set of human remains found after Alison Hernandez told meeting ‘dead bodies’ recovered from site
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/25/devon-and-cornwall-commissioner-sorry-for-multiple-bodies-claim
So that is half a dozen murders instantly cleared up by the Conservative PCC. Match that, Sadiq Khan!
This is not a critique. I have several great friends and family members that are spectrum-y. But it does explain some of your more ludicrous statements
Only the difficult or unusual features will be referred to a Doctor.
(That's based on experience in England, primarily around Diabetes for 25 years.)
GPs may well be involved at the start, and it will be front-loaded as the emphasis is on identifying chronic conditions in order to manage them rather than let compications develop which cost 10x or 100x as much later on to manage (eg getting good D control, rather than supplying prosthetic legs 15 years later).
(That's based on experience in England, primarily around Diabetes for 25 years.)
Post Script:
(I'm currently trying to work out how to get an anti-Pavement Parking message into the rolling display at my local GP to change the culture, as that is where everyone goes over a period of time, hung off "Don't force disabled people & parents with prams into the road by not thinking" wrapped-up more sweetly with a "walking to the GP makes you healthy" packaging.
It seems I need to deal with the CCG or similar who supply them.)
Exclusive: Keir Starmer has hired a former editor of The Sun to one of the most senior government communications roles.
David Dinsmore has won the race for the newly created position of permanent secretary for communications.
Comes with Labour’s success at keeping voters on side in question as they slump from 34% to 22% in the polls in a year.
Starmer personally interviewed the final candidates and was impressed with his understanding of modern comms.
It is a civil service role not a political appointment. No changes in the No10 comms team.
He’ll be tasked with overhauling the vast gov communications operation.
(There are 7,000 government comms officers - roughly one per 5,000 voters.)
https://x.com/benrileysmith/status/1949030714306912446
Thanks to countless centuries of fairly isolated cultural development, a worrying proportion of such arrivals seem to have attitudes that are quite incompatible with the existing residents of Britain, be they Christian, atheist, Muslim or otherwise. No one wants their daughters raped.
So I find it sad how the British left seems so unwilling to recognise that most people in this country are fully aware of this nuance. “You’re an ignorant knuckle dragger that knows no Muslims and can be gulled into hating Muslims” is as effective in driving intolerance as anything that comes out the far right. Eventually the greater weight of opinion gives up the onerous task of maintaining a balanced, nuanced belief set and defaults to the easy choice of taking a black and white position.
Also, the need to arrange an appointment with a GP means that many people opt for walk-in clinics - or, I suppose, A&E.
The problem is they don't differentiate between those people and the so-called wrong-un's, or even just people who were born here. Hence the hysteria over the wrong "white British" figures.
It's very hard to believe that people who screech about 'white British' or Muslims don't have a problem with your list. Because they evidently do, because they are referring to all Muslims.
If the drones are with IDF permission then why not simply deliver the weeks worth of food and other aid in trucks outside Gaza in?
If they are without IDF permission they will be shot down.
“Western Europeans don't understand that the harm they have done to their countries is IRREVERSIBLE, and their children will not forgive them for it.
“They thought they were building an open society. What they created was an unmanageable fracture. They replaced continuity with experimentation, identity with guilt, and cohesion with slogans. Entire generations were told that borders were immoral, that culture was oppressive, and that integration was optional. Now they are reaping the results — and pretending not to see them.
“The cities are divided. The schools are segregated by language and loyalty. The police avoid entire zones. Judges are intimidated. Teachers lie to survive. Religion is ridiculed unless it's imported. The native population is shrinking — and afraid. Those who speak the truth are attacked by their own institutions, while those who undermine the country are subsidized.
“Immigration was not the problem — it was the refusal to set conditions. It was the cowardice of leaders who wanted applause instead of responsibility. It was the moral blackmail of elites who despised their own people, and these people's submissiveness to their elites. What arrived was not just labor or refuge — it was a different civilization, with its own expectations, values, and plans. And no one asked it to adapt.
“The damage is not temporary. It's demographic. It's territorial. It's cultural. It's encoded now into the next hundred years. Their children will grow up in a land their parents no longer recognize — and they will ask, not with anger but disbelief: why did you allow this?”
Will they be diverting vital drone resources from tracking down British fly tippers?
Great Minds Think Like Mine
The people most exercised by demographic change are, on average, older. The youth are mostly chill with it. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are.
In other words, it's the generation who voted for this and enacted it who are most cross about it. If I thought I had stuffed up that badly, I think I would retire to a remote hermitage to live out my life in quiet reflection of what I had got so wrong.
(See also, economics and sexual ethics.)
There is no one "different civilisation" that arrived. That is a form of paranoia. There were many different civilisations, with different characteristics.
I’ve seen this exact process on social media. People who actually have quite a judicious, balanced but sometimes critical opinion of “woke” issues - migration, race, gender, etc - get hysterically labelled as racist, TERFs, Nazis, and the rest
Eventually they give up in angry exasperation and shift completely to the right, abandoning balance and “picking a side”
Waqar, Shoaib, Akram, Mushtaq, Kumble, Srinath, Harbhajan, Donald, Pollock, Klusener, Gough, McGrath, Lee, Warne, Gillespie, Bond, Vettori, Cairns, Vaas, Murali, Curtley, Courtney and the list could go on and on…
I’ve named 22 above. Please name me 10 modern day bowlers that can compare to the names above?
https://x.com/KP24/status/1949015009184403471
A bit daft of her, who I usually rate very highly.
2. Multiple polls show that the western young (under 25) are more rightwing than their elders, and this is intensifying
At the same time some are also veering hard left, but as this is traditional in Da Yoot it is less noteworthy
Seems like the airline has a lot of questions to answer as to why 40 children were removed from the flight and the teacher was then thrown to the ground and handcuffed. For singing in Hebrew?
It's also claimed that the Captain trained two of the 9/11 hijackers. Mad stuff.
https://x.com/HenMazzig/status/1948404725319119028
I'd regard "most people have little personal experience of Muslims" as simply being an observed reality in many areas, which leaves the political opportunity open for such a narrative. It may not be a comfortable thing to say, Nonetheless, that is the (dishonest) narrative deliberately being driven, and partially why - in my assessment - it is getting some response. Dynamic are different in say Bradford or some areas of London.
That imo is also why I can observe GB News starting a piece talking about "Islamist" (ie specifically the 'political Islam' movement), and then a couple of sentences later switching to "Islamic"; they wish to smear all Muslims with charges that are valid only for a very small minority.
That is Lee Anderson's chosen narrative in his inflammatory tweet which generated the demonstration, including his "this rape was by an asylum seeker" claim. This is despite there being no source other than him that has made that claim - it was not in the police statement. If he has it from his conversations with the Notts Police, I do not know. There was other untrue material in his tweet. And he has form for "provocation before accuracy".
Chatting to people who were on or around the Ashfield demonstration last night, they were talking about "Asylum Seekers", and extending it to "get them all out". The narrative has an impact. Equally in the Active Patriot FB group I linked last night.
The facts around rape are that 6/7 of rapes / assault by penetration committed on women are by acquaintances or friends/relations, not by strangers. So 1/7 are by strangers, and a small subset of that by "Asylum Seekers".
But Lee Anderson (my MP) does not talk about rape publicly (that I have heard) unless it lets him stir up loathing of Muslims or "asylum seekers" or "illegal immigrants". He and his ilk are far more frequently using rape as a lever to promote their own wedge politics than they are in dealing with rape as it actually exists.
I'm probably off for a bit now, but will review later.
Congrats for bringing this mad stuff to a wider audience.
Right Zwift + rugby + cricket awaits....
I’m in a pub with three TV boxes 😊
Presumably any such system would work similarly to that for prescription fees, where the people who need lots of prescriptions (elderly, pregnancy, chronic disease) or who struggle to pay (on income support) are exempted. At which point, of course, the amount raised is greatly reduced as those are the people who need lots of GP appointments/prescriptions! 89% of prescriptions (England figures) are dispensed for free. If the same applied to GP appointments... and GPs see about 25 patients per day each... you would be raising about £28 per day per GP. Which is peanuts.
You could tweak who pays prescription fees (although of course it would be unpopular with voters). You don't currently pay if you are over 60. You could increase that to the retirement age. You don't pay if you are 16 or under, but there's no strong argument to exempt 13-16 year olds.
Or we could just pay a bit more in tax. People in France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Italy etc. do and it works fine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/live/cjdx40dkn0nt
The revealing thing about the kids on the bus story as I remember it was that the media needed to explain why the attackers had been provoked. Pure Jew hatred wasn't a good enough motive.
No-one asks about the role of Hamas who to be fair are honest enough to admit that they have no responsibility for making sure the Gazans don't starve.
@GoodwinMJ
Wow. Nearly 1 in every 6 phones that are stolen in Europe are stolen in … London (The Times)
London is so over …"
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1948996990915748199