If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
George Galloway's theory is she chose Hove for the chicken run when Labour's support in Manchester implodes.
That doesn't bear scrutiny.
Hove and Portslade is a very safe Labour constituency (I think the only threat there is from the Greens) and has a cabinet minister as MP who isn't likely to stand down. If she doesn't stand in Ashton then it's because she is standing down entirely.
More likely she was looking at a London seat, spends the week in London working then easy trip down to Hove for weekends. Makes sense on many levels. Her chap was a London councillor and Ilford MP in the past too so there is a connection and support network.
And according to your earlier post, Sam Tarry hangs around in Brighton which is pretty much the same place, hence Brighton & Hove Albion FC.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Yes, the lowest claims of all the MP's, I seem to remember. What a better Prime Minister he would have been than Bozo or Truss.
But the tabloids got the bacon, again.
I don't like lowest claims as a metric, bit unfair on Shetland/Western Isles etc. But his claims were as clean as they come.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
I don't think it was a deliberate tax dodge. But it was beyond naive, but it was absolute stupidity. You are a very senior politician who only a few months ago her previous claimed living arrangements got her in a lot of bother. You know you have this complicated set of arrangements, the conveyancer tells you you need to get tax advice, you earn a £160k a year and extremely well connected (see how she managed to get a very expensive KC to review her case at the drop of a hat over a weekend), you pay the money to cover your arse.
Then what followed sunk her.
Sam Tarry’s housing situation re multiple homes also had caused him a load of grief when a councillor so between them they should have known more than most to check everything is absolutely bang on before signing on the bottom line.
“ Tarry was a Labour Party councillor for Chadwell Heath ward, in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, from 2010 to 2018.[7] Tarry was criticised for allegedly living in his home in Brighton, which is 70 miles away from his then council seat in Barking and Dagenham.[8][9][10] He was investigated by police for electoral fraud in relation to this matter, and was cleared by the police investigation, as he was found to own a second home in Barking and Dagenham, and therefore was legally resident in Barking and Dagenham at the time of his election.”
I don't know what point you are trying to make. Sam Tarry obviously did check everything was "bang on", because when some pathetic shit-stirrer decided to waste police time and have them investigate this, everything was absolutely legal.
My point was that if you and your partner are both politicians and have both had past problems relating to living in two places to whatever extent and the intricacies of what is your main home and also that you know that there are plenty of people waiting for you to slip up, then surely next time you dip into the property market you make sure that everything is absolutely checked and triple checked by lawyers/accountants/tax advisers.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Yes but the narrative of those hostile to Rayner is to paint as negative a picture of her as possible to forestall any attempt at rehabilitation in a year or two.
The fact remains she breached the Ministerial Code and that made her position untenable. Whether said Code is fit for purpose is another question - we want to ensure Government is as free as possible from allegations of corruption or inappropriate influence such as from third party lobbying companies - but the notion complex non-Government related private financial transactions need to be held to such a high standard - well, I understand why many would wish our Ministers to be beyond any kind of reproach especially since the Expenses Scandal - doesn't sit well with me and some latitude for genuine errors should exist (as distinct from deliberate and planned tax evasion).
She was a damn fool not to seek further advice as recommended.
But I'm remembering how but for a chance conversation with my accountant I would once have ended up paying the wrong rate of stamp duty too, and it would never even have crossed my mind to check.
There but for the grace of God...
Most of the population will have had similar experiences. The whole thing has essentially been a nonsense.
But an important political job dione by the Telegraph, with which they are very obviously delighted.
Hardly nonsense but it wasn't just the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The question remains who did the leaking and their motive ?
The other question remains how Starmer so quickly changed his cabinet if he hadn't known this was coming.
He is also a winner here
Could it be Starmer himself, via an intermediary? He doesn't appear to like female MPs from Greater Manchester in his cabinet/shadow cabinet. Nandy is the only one of the original 4 left (Long-Bailey was dismissed a while ago) and he is suspected to regard Nandy with contempt too.
Starmer appears to have a women problem full stop.
That'll be why the CoE, HS and FS are all women? First time ever, I read, that the three great offices of state have been held by women.
But are they the three best people available to Starmer?
Not sure if yes or no is the worst answer.
Two out of the three have the hallmark of Dame Jacqui Smith about them. And yes there are better options out there.
As a friendly aside you do seem to have misremembered the likes of Priti Patel and Braverman made the highest offices of state too.
Trevor Phillips of Sky suggest the winners from yesterday are Shabana Mahmood and Pat McFadden
He expects Mahmood to be much more forceful on immigration and the boats and McFadden on reigning in the welfare budget
I agree with him and actually quite like both those politicians and appointments
The bigger question is will labour mps go along with these two important ministers
Re the last paragraph, likely QTWTAIN - but, they do have one last chance after the budget to properly seize the moment and get the unpopular (to Labour MPs, anyway) out of the way with, to then move the narrative on to (they hope) a better 2027/28/29.
It will require a level of direction, conviction and strength of purpose that Labour have been extremely lacking up til now, so I don’t rate the chances at higher than 10%, but the next 12 months are really critical for Labour - they’ve already wasted the first 12, and they’re soon going to be approaching midterm where any will to do anything painful will completely evaporate.
“Will” evaporating suggests it exists in the first place…
Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.
It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.
I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.
Are they?
There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.
For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.
Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).
So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.
That's largely wrong.
For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.
Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.
And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.
I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.
Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.
I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.
Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:
Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
Puts more pressure on your local services
Wrecks the nice view across the fields
Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.
I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.
One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.
So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.
Agreed but if the government was to “force” housebuilding on towns and villages than this looks like a model that delivers a good amount in a relatively small space with a good quality of life by the look of things.
It’s 53 houses that wouldn’t kill the look of most villages or small towns. I don’t know how many villages and small towns there are in the UK but bolting something like this onto as many as possible starts to reduce the problem. The architect was also saying that the properties were 20% cheaper than their normal equivalents in the market so again gives more chance to buy.
It may be 20% cheaper to make them but they will still sell at the market price and capture the margin
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Yes but the narrative of those hostile to Rayner is to paint as negative a picture of her as possible to forestall any attempt at rehabilitation in a year or two.
The fact remains she breached the Ministerial Code and that made her position untenable. Whether said Code is fit for purpose is another question - we want to ensure Government is as free as possible from allegations of corruption or inappropriate influence such as from third party lobbying companies - but the notion complex non-Government related private financial transactions need to be held to such a high standard - well, I understand why many would wish our Ministers to be beyond any kind of reproach especially since the Expenses Scandal - doesn't sit well with me and some latitude for genuine errors should exist (as distinct from deliberate and planned tax evasion).
She was a damn fool not to seek further advice as recommended.
But I'm remembering how but for a chance conversation with my accountant I would once have ended up paying the wrong rate of stamp duty too, and it would never even have crossed my mind to check.
There but for the grace of God...
Most of the population will have had similar experiences. The whole thing has essentially been a nonsense.
But an important political job dione by the Telegraph, with which they are very obviously delighted.
Hardly nonsense but it wasn't just the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The question remains who did the leaking and their motive ?
The other question remains how Starmer so quickly changed his cabinet if he hadn't known this was coming.
He is also a winner here
Could it be Starmer himself, via an intermediary? He doesn't appear to like female MPs from Greater Manchester in his cabinet/shadow cabinet. Nandy is the only one of the original 4 left (Long-Bailey was dismissed a while ago) and he is suspected to regard Nandy with contempt too.
Nah, if she has a rival, it is Streeting. A man who has the look of ambition, self belief and not much else.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Yes but the narrative of those hostile to Rayner is to paint as negative a picture of her as possible to forestall any attempt at rehabilitation in a year or two.
The fact remains she breached the Ministerial Code and that made her position untenable. Whether said Code is fit for purpose is another question - we want to ensure Government is as free as possible from allegations of corruption or inappropriate influence such as from third party lobbying companies - but the notion complex non-Government related private financial transactions need to be held to such a high standard - well, I understand why many would wish our Ministers to be beyond any kind of reproach especially since the Expenses Scandal - doesn't sit well with me and some latitude for genuine errors should exist (as distinct from deliberate and planned tax evasion).
She was a damn fool not to seek further advice as recommended.
But I'm remembering how but for a chance conversation with my accountant I would once have ended up paying the wrong rate of stamp duty too, and it would never even have crossed my mind to check.
There but for the grace of God...
Most of the population will have had similar experiences. The whole thing has essentially been a nonsense.
But an important political job dione by the Telegraph, with which they are very obviously delighted.
Hardly nonsense but it wasn't just the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The question remains who did the leaking and their motive ?
The other question remains how Starmer so quickly changed his cabinet if he hadn't known this was coming.
He is also a winner here
Could it be Starmer himself, via an intermediary? He doesn't appear to like female MPs from Greater Manchester in his cabinet/shadow cabinet. Nandy is the only one of the original 4 left (Long-Bailey was dismissed a while ago) and he is suspected to regard Nandy with contempt too.
Starmer appears to have a women problem full stop.
That'll be why the CoE, HS and FS are all women? First time ever, I read, that the three great offices of state have been held by women.
But are they the three best people available to Starmer?
Not sure if yes or no is the worst answer.
Two out of the three have the hallmark of Dame Jacqui Smith about them. And yes there are better options out there.
As a friendly aside you do seem to have misremembered the likes of Priti Patel and Braverman made the highest offices of state too.
You seem to have misremembered that the party that had them was on the end of an almighty drubbing. A precedent you want to follow?
Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.
It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.
I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.
Are they?
There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.
For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.
Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).
So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.
That's largely wrong.
For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.
Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.
And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.
I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.
Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.
I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.
Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:
Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
Puts more pressure on your local services
Wrecks the nice view across the fields
Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.
I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.
One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.
So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.
Agreed but if the government was to “force” housebuilding on towns and villages than this looks like a model that delivers a good amount in a relatively small space with a good quality of life by the look of things.
It’s 53 houses that wouldn’t kill the look of most villages or small towns. I don’t know how many villages and small towns there are in the UK but bolting something like this onto as many as possible starts to reduce the problem. The architect was also saying that the properties were 20% cheaper than their normal equivalents in the market so again gives more chance to buy.
Your communities number is something like 25k->50k in England. Approximately 20k Church of England church buildings is always a useful indicator - remembering that that includes urban, but not all places have one.
If you watch for how many places have small council estates built in the 20s-30s or in the 3 decades post-war, it is an indicator of the feel it gives to places. They are, for example, all over Derbyshire.
The Nimbyism is really about not liking change - once they have been there for a decade they will be accepted. If you look, for example, at projects doing new mobility infra in towns or cities, the loudest shouting is often about "but it will cause congestion because of all the roadworks".
Getting things done quickly, and in discrete focused phases if larger projects, makes a huge difference.
The issue mentioned in another post about benefits not being delivered is far more serious imo, and is partly to do with Councils having been gutted of capacity to manage such effectively and professionally. Often conditions can be defined unprofessionally such that they are unenforcible *.
* A classic example would be "X must be done when 50 houses are built", so it is in the developer interest to stop at 49 and lose 2% of revenue. That particular one is probably managed now as part of SOP.
In Somerset it took 5 years to negotiate the section 106. Despite 98% of their asks being accepted on the first draft.
And they just told us it will be 12 months before they will even look at the next planning application (unless we pay for them to hire a consultant to work in their planning department).
Is the Moroccan government paying Ryanair to fly 90% empty routes to Western Sahara?
From the Desert to the Sea, Western Sahara will be free!
Ah but desert for how much longer? It’s pissing it down in Western Sahara at the moment as the ITCZ does a sharp Northern detour for the second summer in a row.
Surgeon who destroyed his legs, and had them amputated, because of a fetish, then indulged in insurance fraud as an add-on, and ended up with years in prison.
When I interviewed surgeon Neil Hopper in 2023 for BBC News, I believed I was speaking to a man who had been humbled by the life-changing experience of losing his legs to sepsis.
Little did I know, Hopper had a sexual interest in amputation and had frozen his own legs so they would be removed.
Hopper, a consultant vascular surgeon who had carried out hundreds of amputation operations, told me he had come down with a mystery illness on a family camping trip which had led to sepsis and below-knee amputations of both his legs.
In reality, he had used ice and dry ice to freeze his own legs, causing damage that meant they eventually had to be amputated in hospital,
Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.
It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.
I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.
Are they?
There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.
For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.
Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).
So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.
That's largely wrong.
For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.
Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.
And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.
I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.
Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.
I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.
Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:
Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
Puts more pressure on your local services
Wrecks the nice view across the fields
Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.
I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.
One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.
So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.
Agreed but if the government was to “force” housebuilding on towns and villages than this looks like a model that delivers a good amount in a relatively small space with a good quality of life by the look of things.
It’s 53 houses that wouldn’t kill the look of most villages or small towns. I don’t know how many villages and small towns there are in the UK but bolting something like this onto as many as possible starts to reduce the problem. The architect was also saying that the properties were 20% cheaper than their normal equivalents in the market so again gives more chance to buy.
Your communities number is something like 25k->50k in England. Approximately 20k Church of England church buildings is always a useful indicator - remembering that that includes urban, but not all places have one.
If you watch for how many places have small council estates built in the 20s-30s or in the 3 decades post-war, it is an indicator of the feel it gives to places. They are, for example, all over Derbyshire.
The Nimbyism is really about not liking change - once they have been there for a decade they will be accepted. If you look, for example, at projects doing new mobility infra in towns or cities, the loudest shouting is often about "but it will cause congestion because of all the roadworks".
Getting things done quickly, and in discrete focused phases if larger projects, makes a huge difference.
The issue mentioned in another post about benefits not being delivered is far more serious imo, and is partly to do with Councils having been gutted of capacity to manage such effectively and professionally. Often conditions can be defined unprofessionally such that they are unenforcible *.
* A classic example would be "X must be done when 50 houses are built", so it is in the developer interest to stop at 49 and lose 2% of revenue. That particular one is probably managed now as part of SOP.
In Somerset it took 5 years to negotiate the section 106. Despite 98% of their asks being accepted on the first draft.
And they just told us it will be 12 months before they will even look at the next planning application (unless we pay for them to hire a consultant to work in their planning department).
That's interesting. Unilateral declarations followed by an intention to Appeal can help speed that up. Maybe.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Moderately interesting question for Wales next year. Reforms position as of yesterday is making the Senedd work for Welsh people and if not potentially scrapping it (is it value for money? Being how they couched it) If they go too hard on that route might it restrict their progress/be a stick for the others to beat them with? If they get painted successfully (however fairly or unfairly) as Abolish The Welsh Assembly then there will be a pretty low ceiling for them id think......
Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.
It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.
I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.
Are they?
There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.
For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.
Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).
So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.
That's largely wrong.
For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.
Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.
And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.
I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.
Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.
I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.
Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:
Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
Puts more pressure on your local services
Wrecks the nice view across the fields
Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.
I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.
One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.
So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.
Agreed but if the government was to “force” housebuilding on towns and villages than this looks like a model that delivers a good amount in a relatively small space with a good quality of life by the look of things.
It’s 53 houses that wouldn’t kill the look of most villages or small towns. I don’t know how many villages and small towns there are in the UK but bolting something like this onto as many as possible starts to reduce the problem. The architect was also saying that the properties were 20% cheaper than their normal equivalents in the market so again gives more chance to buy.
Your communities number is something like 25k->50k in England. Approximately 20k Church of England church buildings is always a useful indicator - remembering that that includes urban, but not all places have one.
If you watch for how many places have small council estates built in the 20s-30s or in the 3 decades post-war, it is an indicator of the feel it gives to places. They are, for example, all over Derbyshire.
The Nimbyism is really about not liking change - once they have been there for a decade they will be accepted. If you look, for example, at projects doing new mobility infra in towns or cities, the loudest shouting is often about "but it will cause congestion because of all the roadworks".
Getting things done quickly, and in discrete focused phases if larger projects, makes a huge difference.
The issue mentioned in another post about benefits not being delivered is far more serious imo, and is partly to do with Councils having been gutted of capacity to manage such effectively and professionally. Often conditions can be defined unprofessionally such that they are unenforcible *.
* A classic example would be "X must be done when 50 houses are built", so it is in the developer interest to stop at 49 and lose 2% of revenue. That particular one is probably managed now as part of SOP.
In Somerset it took 5 years to negotiate the section 106. Despite 98% of their asks being accepted on the first draft.
And they just told us it will be 12 months before they will even look at the next planning application (unless we pay for them to hire a consultant to work in their planning department).
HS2 got caught by that one as well: “you will pay us to employ the professionals who will spend their entire working life ferreting out ways to block your planning application or else” is a nice racket.
Surgeon who destroyed his legs, and had them amputated, because of a fetish, then indulged in insurance fraud as an add-on, and ended up with years in prison.
When I interviewed surgeon Neil Hopper in 2023 for BBC News, I believed I was speaking to a man who had been humbled by the life-changing experience of losing his legs to sepsis.
Little did I know, Hopper had a sexual interest in amputation and had frozen his own legs so they would be removed.
Hopper, a consultant vascular surgeon who had carried out hundreds of amputation operations, told me he had come down with a mystery illness on a family camping trip which had led to sepsis and below-knee amputations of both his legs.
In reality, he had used ice and dry ice to freeze his own legs, causing damage that meant they eventually had to be amputated in hospital,
Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.
It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.
I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.
Are they?
There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.
For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.
Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).
So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.
That's largely wrong.
For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.
Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.
And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.
I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.
Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.
I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.
Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:
Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
Puts more pressure on your local services
Wrecks the nice view across the fields
Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.
I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.
One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.
So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.
Agreed but if the government was to “force” housebuilding on towns and villages than this looks like a model that delivers a good amount in a relatively small space with a good quality of life by the look of things.
It’s 53 houses that wouldn’t kill the look of most villages or small towns. I don’t know how many villages and small towns there are in the UK but bolting something like this onto as many as possible starts to reduce the problem. The architect was also saying that the properties were 20% cheaper than their normal equivalents in the market so again gives more chance to buy.
Your communities number is something like 25k->50k in England. Approximately 20k Church of England church buildings is always a useful indicator - remembering that that includes urban, but not all places have one.
If you watch for how many places have small council estates built in the 20s-30s or in the 3 decades post-war, it is an indicator of the feel it gives to places. They are, for example, all over Derbyshire.
The Nimbyism is really about not liking change - once they have been there for a decade they will be accepted. If you look, for example, at projects doing new mobility infra in towns or cities, the loudest shouting is often about "but it will cause congestion because of all the roadworks".
Getting things done quickly, and in discrete focused phases if larger projects, makes a huge difference.
The issue mentioned in another post about benefits not being delivered is far more serious imo, and is partly to do with Councils having been gutted of capacity to manage such effectively and professionally. Often conditions can be defined unprofessionally such that they are unenforcible *.
* A classic example would be "X must be done when 50 houses are built", so it is in the developer interest to stop at 49 and lose 2% of revenue. That particular one is probably managed now as part of SOP.
In Somerset it took 5 years to negotiate the section 106. Despite 98% of their asks being accepted on the first draft.
And they just told us it will be 12 months before they will even look at the next planning application (unless we pay for them to hire a consultant to work in their planning department).
That's interesting. Unilateral declarations followed by an intention to Appeal can help speed that up. Maybe.
The estate I am a trustee of can’t afford to piss off the council. There’s a lot of interaction on multiple topics.
Moderately interesting question for Wales next year. Reforms position as of yesterday is making the Senedd work for Welsh people and if not potentially scrapping it (is it value for money? Being how they couched it) If they go too hard on that route might it restrict their progress/be a stick for the others to beat them with? If they get painted successfully (however fairly or unfairly) as Abolish The Welsh Assembly then there will be a pretty low ceiling for them id think......
Moderately interesting question for Wales next year. Reforms position as of yesterday is making the Senedd work for Welsh people and if not potentially scrapping it (is it value for money? Being how they couched it) If they go too hard on that route might it restrict their progress/be a stick for the others to beat them with? If they get painted successfully (however fairly or unfairly) as Abolish The Welsh Assembly then there will be a pretty low ceiling for them id think......
I do not want the Senedd abolished
No indeed, and I think its fairly niche now. Abolish themselves were getting 6 or 7% in the polling but with the PR system taking a position that even costs you, say, 4 or 5% may be the difference of several seats and administration or opposition.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
It doesn't matter right now. If people think he has a better chance of getting to grips with it debates about two weeks here or there will matter not one jot.
If other parties can display competence in the area then it will show him up as a chancer. But right now it will make little difference.
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
He’s not used to being asked difficult questions because most of the media supports him.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
Is there any event in the cosmos that can't be interpreted as 'fantastic for Nigel Farage'? There have been some strange ones over the years labelled in this way: the sacking of Owen Paterson, Grant Shapps issuing a tweet about a reduction in bingo tax.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
And yet he receives lots of coverage, is way ahead in the polls, and has Labour running scared
Why is that do you think
The coverage so far has been fawning without anyone asking the difficult questions . I expect Farage will avoid any interviews unless they’re with the lickspittle right wing media.
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
How does that matter ? She's gone.
It doesn’t matter. I’m just summing up the past few days discussions.
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
The middle 80%: If you’re going to mouth off and call for resignations of opponents every week, you’d better be Ceasar’s wife and not a massive hypocrite tax evader.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
Is there any event in the cosmos that can't be interpreted as 'fantastic for Nigel Farage'? There have been some strange ones over the years labelled in this way: the sacking of Owen Paterson, Grant Shapps issuing a tweet about a reduction in bingo tax.
At present I think he is getting huge oxygen from the media and the government are an utter shambles
Labour and the conservatives have to lift their game but that will take a considerable time even if they can
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
No, it's not that she should have had an understanding of Trust law, I mean who does? It's that she should have recognised that being a trustee is fraught with complications and sought expert advice after being told to do so during her purchase process. That she chose to ignore the advice and then proceeded to blame everyone else for her own failing is why she needed to go, not because she didn't have an understanding of Trust law.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
How does that matter ? She's gone.
We are going to experience grief from Rayner's supporters much like we witnessed with Boris and likely to continue in much the same vein for a long time
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
How does that matter ? She's gone.
We are going to experience grief from Rayner's supporters much like we witnessed with Boris and likely to continue in much the same vein for a long time
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
Yes but the point is his fans think he is this genuine bloke, just like them, fighting the great machinery of the Establishment to free them all from all that ails them. The press are just trying to tricksy him. They just dont see that he IS what they want freeing from. Hes no more an Insurgent than Michael Howard or Tony Blair. Failed career Tories ain't revolutionaries and they love his tobacco backside
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
In the TRiP Rayner reaction podcast, AC mentions in passing meeting Telegraph editor Chris Evans at the cricket on Wednesday, and Evans saying that Conservatives would always be phoning with ideas and offers to write, but now there is nothing from anyone apart from Robert Jenrick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMiWIH4v9ik&t=1810s
Interesting comments on the podcast. People seem to understand that it was a wafer thin misunderstanding and with a bit more guile she could have avoided the £40,000 legally in several ways.......
......the problem seems to be that she moved out of Ashton-under-lyne to better herself in Hove and that is pissing off Ashtonians like you wouldn't believe!
Snobs don't just live in Weybridge and come in all shapes and sizes. There are inverted ones too but this is the heart of the problem. She lost the support of her peers.....
I feel sorry for her because had she been more guileful say like a Farage you can be sure that under the same circumstances he would never have paid the extra £40,000 nor would he have been pilloried for weeks by the telegraph
Why did the Guardian then publish the statement from her conveyancers who said they were being scapegoated and had acted entirely on the information provided
You need to come to terms with the fact this is nothing to do with her background but all to do with her own actions or non actions
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
Is there any event in the cosmos that can't be interpreted as 'fantastic for Nigel Farage'? There have been some strange ones over the years labelled in this way: the sacking of Owen Paterson, Grant Shapps issuing a tweet about a reduction in bingo tax.
At present I think he is getting huge oxygen from the media and the government are an utter shambles
Labour and the conservatives have to lift their game but that will take a considerable time even if they can
I hate the phrase and hated it even more in 2008 but they both do need to get on with the job Labour have a country to run and the Tories have been around for 350 years and are HM opposition. Their contant blubbing (the politicians and party not anyone here) because they might lose seats etc is getting very old. Grow a set and fight for some votes and stop shitting yourself because Lee Anderson might be under the bed making 30p soup
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
Actually it was 3 kitchens.
They had a mini-kitchen off the lounge upstairs for refreshments-whilst-lounging.
And there was an extra one in the basement, because iirc they had reincorporated a previously separate flat into the main house.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
No, it came from a tone deaf interview he gave to the BBC, which included a photo of what he claimed was his kitchen....except it wasn't really, he didn't want to show his real kitchen. He had a habit of these stunts e.g. removing the first class seat covers from train photo ops.
Then he started lying saying well we don't really use the downstairs kitchen, but people pointed out the one they showed was missing everything you would need if you wanted more than to make cups of tea and beans on toast.
I doubt when Mrs Osborne popped round to her friends Mrs Miliband there were nattering in what looked a poor student flat kitchen. All the politicos knew they were lying as they had been to hus house for dinner.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
The racist-abuse culture that Farage & Co are seeding and feeding certainly has potential to revolt a chunk of Reform voters, but for another chunk it is the culture they want.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
No - it was they had a family kitchen and a kitchen for entertaining. Which is a bit pretentious.
@TheScreamingEagles by constrast has one kitchen and a flotilla of staff to carry the food around
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
Actually it was 3 kitchens.
They had a mini-kitchen off the lounge upstairs for refreshments-whilst-lounging.
And there was an extra one in the basement, because iirc they had reincorporated a previously separate flat into the main house.
Remember the hate campaign against Ms Sturgeon for having a upmarket coffeewotsit in her kitchen.
PB Labour supporters “Angela Rayner has been unfairly picked on because she’s working class”. PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”. Quelle surprise!
And people like me: she made a mistake but should have admitted it rather than trying to brazen it out. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
No - it was they had a family kitchen and a kitchen for entertaining. Which is a bit pretentious.
@TheScreamingEagles by constrast has one kitchen and a flotilla of staff to carry the food around
House near me is being massively renovated. Huge games and entertainments/entertaining room. It's got this mysterious "bar" at one end which I think is what they call the kitchen for entertaining. Just depends what you call it.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Where did I call them that ?
I didnt say you did,
I am however saying Labourites like Clive Lewis making statements re flags is not going to win back votes.
The simple facts is these days Labour represent the well to do classes and trying to portray the Tories or Farage as the poshos isnt credible when your own supporters are packed with well- heeled people.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
Actually it was 3 kitchens.
They had a mini-kitchen off the lounge upstairs for refreshments-whilst-lounging.
And there was an extra one in the basement, because iirc they had reincorporated a previously separate flat into the main house.
Remember the hate campaign against Ms Sturgeon for having a upmarket coffeewotsit in her kitchen.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Unlikely.
All the data we have are that there are very few Lab to Ref switchers since last year.
It's mainly Lab to Lib/Green/shrug and Con to Ref.
Can the Conservatives win back people who, despite everything, voted for them in 2024? Tricky. Can they do so without becoming Reform? Probably impossible, and if they do- what's the point?
One of the curiosities is that a lot of parties seem a bit ashamed of who their actual electorate are.
If I remember correctly, they also had either a nanny or basically full time help (as Mrs Miliband has her own very success career) and when they arrived for the interview the "help" was outside cleaning the car. I think it was most likely the sparse kitchen shown was actually the "helps" kitchen to make teas and snacks.
But Miliband was trying to portray himself as man of the people vs Cameron the elite.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
Actually it was 3 kitchens.
They had a mini-kitchen off the lounge upstairs for refreshments-whilst-lounging.
And there was an extra one in the basement, because iirc they had reincorporated a previously separate flat into the main house.
If I remember correctly, they also had either a nanny or basically full time help (as Mrs Miliband has her own very success career) and when they arrived for the interview the "help" was outside cleaning the car. I think it was most likely the sparse kitchen shown was actually the "helps" kitchen to make teas and snacks.
But Miliband was trying to portray himself as man of the people vs Cameron the elite.
That’s the correct way of doing two kitchens, you have the “Staff” kitchen and the “Show” kitchen next to it.
The first one is where stuff actually gets cooked, and the second is where you take photos of your fancy island.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
No, it came from a tone deaf interview he gave to the BBC, which included a photo of what he claimed was his kitchen....except it wasn't really, he didn't want to show his real kitchen. He had a habit of these stunts e.g. removing the first class seat covers from train photo ops.
Then he started lying saying well we don't really use the downstairs kitchen, but people pointed out the one they showed was missing everything you would need if you wanted more than to make cups of tea and beans on toast.
I doubt when Mrs Osborne popped round to her friends Mrs Miliband there were nattering in what looked a poor student flat kitchen. All the politicos knew they were lying as they had been to hus house for dinner.
It is often forgotten by those of us who in hindsight think the 2015 election went the wrong way, that Miliband wasn’t just taken to pieces by the right wing press (though he was) but he also walked into a lot of clangers regarding his public image which made him look try-hard and awkward. A lot of politicians waste a lot of capital fighting the last war, and one of the things Labour tried to do with Miliband was to turn him into a replica of the young, charismatic, sleeves-rolled-up, charming, unthreatening image that Cameron had managed to build. And it just wasn’t the right fit for him.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Unlikely.
All the data we have are that there are very few Lab to Ref switchers since last year.
It's mainly Lab to Lib/Green/shrug and Con to Ref.
Can the Conservatives win back people who, despite everything, voted for them in 2024? Tricky. Can they do so without becoming Reform? Probably impossible, and if they do- what's the point?
One of the curiosities is that a lot of parties don't seem a bit ashamed of who their actual electorate are.
Tories should be working on the 7 million voters they lost 2019 to 2024. Particularly those that went to no vote.and get a head of steam up in a few areas - there are a handful to work on from the May elections. Labour need to start shoring up their vote in London and the industrial North LibDems just work the arse out of what they hold plus a few targets And they all need to play business as usual. They are as guilty of feeding the dragon as anyone (maybe not the LDs tbf)
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Unlikely.
All the data we have are that there are very few Lab to Ref switchers since last year.
It's mainly Lab to Lib/Green/shrug and Con to Ref.
Can the Conservatives win back people who, despite everything, voted for them in 2024? Tricky. Can they do so without becoming Reform? Probably impossible, and if they do- what's the point?
One of the curiosities is that a lot of parties seem a bit ashamed of who their actual electorate are.
The Conservatives have well and truly screwed themselves. They cannot climb out of the 14 years doing nothing accusation and have little idea of what they do next. To a degree Reform are still benefitting from voters who wont vote Conservative.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
No, it came from a tone deaf interview he gave to the BBC, which included a photo of what he claimed was his kitchen....except it wasn't really, he didn't want to show his real kitchen. He had a habit of these stunts e.g. removing the first class seat covers from train photo ops.
Then he started lying saying well we don't really use the downstairs kitchen, but people pointed out the one they showed was missing everything you would need if you wanted more than to make cups of tea and beans on toast.
I doubt when Mrs Osborne popped round to her friends Mrs Miliband there were nattering in what looked a poor student flat kitchen. All the politicos knew they were lying as they had been to hus house for dinner.
It is often forgotten by those of us who in hindsight think the 2015 election went the wrong way, that Miliband wasn’t just taken to pieces by the right wing press (though he was) but he also walked into a lot of clangers regarding his public image which made him look try-hard and awkward. A lot of politicians waste a lot of capital fighting the last war, and one of the things Labour tried to do with Miliband was to turn him into a replica of the young, charismatic, sleeves-rolled-up, charming, unthreatening image that Cameron had managed to build. And it just wasn’t the right fit for him.
Tories made the same mistake last time out, having Sunak doing stunts that were clearly designed for a Johnson or Truss character.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Might for now end up a net wash but eventually there comes a tipping point. And losing grey votes if it happens is losing definite voters in return for voters who often have a track record of doing something less boring instead
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Unlikely.
All the data we have are that there are very few Lab to Ref switchers since last year.
It's mainly Lab to Lib/Green/shrug and Con to Ref.
Can the Conservatives win back people who, despite everything, voted for them in 2024? Tricky. Can they do so without becoming Reform? Probably impossible, and if they do- what's the point?
One of the curiosities is that a lot of parties seem a bit ashamed of who their actual electorate are.
All the data ???
Sounds like you're trying to convince yourself.
There's some data here:
Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority Election North Lincolnshire Council count: HORSCROFT, Sally Anne, The Green Party – 1,604 JENKYNS, Andrea Marie, Reform UK – 12,993 OVERTON, Marianne Jane, Lincolnshire Independents – 977 STOCKWOOD, Jason, Labour and Co-operative Party – 4,825 WALTHAM, Rob, Local Conservatives – 14,003 YOUNG, Trevor, Liberal Democrats – 1021
If I remember correctly, they also had either a nanny or basically full time help (as Mrs Miliband has her own very success career) and when they arrived for the interview the "help" was outside cleaning the car. I think it was most likely the sparse kitchen shown was actually the "helps" kitchen to make teas and snacks.
But Miliband was trying to portray himself as man of the people vs Cameron the elite.
That’s the correct way of doing two kitchens, you have the “Staff” kitchen and the “Show” kitchen next to it.
The first one is where stuff actually gets cooked, and the second is where you take photos of your fancy island.
It rather insults your intelligence when politicians try to claim they live in shitty student digs when between a successful professional couple in their 40s in London will easily make £250-300k a year. Its not just Ed Miliband, loads do it. I presume that is part of the reason behind Starmer's tactic of never doing anything from home and was using Lord Ali's flat, then he doesn't have to play those silly games.
Its why I have no issue with Rayner buying a flat for £800k (might be stretching himself a bit thin, but that's her risk to take). She was making the sort of money that affords you that.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Might for now end up a net wash but eventually there comes a tipping point. And losing grey votes if it happens is losing definite voters in return for voters who often have a track record of doing something less boring instead
If they are even registered, in between scratching their tiktoks or whatever it is called now.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Seriously they’re going to have her give a speech . When will Tommy be doing his speech ?
Other than small boats this government will rise or fall on this surely.
It's only a small proportion of the country that worries about housing costs. On average they are the lowest they have been since the '80s. I think a crash in prices is actually more of a risk to them than the opposite, particularly in London/SE if they introduce a property value tax and people start worrying about negative equity.
I think the NHS is a much bigger risk. But all of this is trumped by a general sense of inertia.
Are they?
There is a crucial distinction between house prices and housing costs.
For a start, you have 35%ish of the country that own their property outright. Then you have another 30% who own with a mortgage - they got hammered a bit during the period with high interest rates, but most people with a mortgage do not spend a particularly high proportion of their income on housing. For both these groups, high house prices are a good thing - they are an asset, not a liability or a cost.
Then you have social renters - 15%. A mixed picture, sometimes good, might not want to buy. And then private renters - another 15%. Not all private rents are insanely high - that tends to be an issue in the big cities, not our towns, and not all private renters want to buy anyway (e.g. students).
So you're not left with many people for whom lower house prices is a good thing (and particularly not in the main voting cohorts), nor many people with particularly high housing costs. There are broader societal/economic reasons why you might want to change this, but ultimately this is why housing is not a major issue in the polling.
That's largely wrong.
For many of those who own their own place, even outright, high house prices are a bad thing, as they want to upgrade in the future. And even if they don't, again for many, high house prices are neutral, as those gains will be on paper forever. And even if house prices are neutral for older homeowners, many will have to fork over fortunes if they want to help their children get on the housing ladder.
Private rent is determined in large part by the cost of housing, (though other factors such as government regulations also play a part), so reducing property prices would reduce the cost of rent. Students may not want to buy now (though I'm not sure about that - I once visited a friend at business school where housing was very cheap and finance readily available and he said that many of his classmates had bought a place for the two years and would then sell it or rent it out when they moved on) but they are likely to in a few years.
And of course there are costs throughout the economy because of high property prices generally, of which high house prices are an important component, though most people won't recognise those.
I think the reason housing doesn't feature is not that more people wouldn't benefit from lower house prices, just as they would benefit from lower food or energy prices, it's that both governing parties have been equally crap about this for a generation and nobody seriously expects either of them to sort it out.
Both main parties in Ireland have been monumentally useless over housing, but people in Ireland are still furious about the issue.
I wonder whether in Britain it has been tied up with the immigration issue. Britons may believe the argument that the housing crisis is primarily a crisis created by immigration, and so they're furious about immigration, whereas in Ireland people are more focused on the lack of supply.
Yep, there's that too. Housebuilding in your area:
Deflates the value of your most valuable asset
Puts more pressure on your local services
Wrecks the nice view across the fields
Puts you at risk of negative equity (if you have a mortgage)
Is only necessary due to the Boriswave (in the public's eye)
and even private renters are rightly deeply sceptical that housebuilding will solve the problem - it certainly hasn't in Edinburgh and the Lothians, which has had the fastest housebuilding programme pretty much anywhere. All it's done is facilitate even faster population growth, including students.
I think this is one of those topics where people have a vague sense that housebuilding is good for the country, but the NIMBYism is very strong and frankly rational. It's only in some city centres where you are going to get a degree of local support for it.
I was listening about this award winning development on Today this morning which could be a good model for bolting on multiple homes onto existing villages and towns without ballsing them up. Some interesting rules were put in place such as no more than 40% of residents over 65 (think it was 65) to ensure a good mix of people so a proper “community”.
One problem is that extra housebuilding in any single area doesn’t even touch the sides of the latent demand for housing in this country.
So unless we see mass housebuilding everywhere, people are going to rationally believe that any development local to them is all downside with no upside.
If you want to increase the population by 0.5% a year, then you need to look at countries that do that, already.
The main thing in such places is that building is cheap and there is next to no NIMBYism. I mean, in Northern Peru, you *could* try to stop your neighbour building a house. But I wouldn’t recommend it.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
No, it came from a tone deaf interview he gave to the BBC, which included a photo of what he claimed was his kitchen....except it wasn't really, he didn't want to show his real kitchen. He had a habit of these stunts e.g. removing the first class seat covers from train photo ops.
Then he started lying saying well we don't really use the downstairs kitchen, but people pointed out the one they showed was missing everything you would need if you wanted more than to make cups of tea and beans on toast.
I doubt when Mrs Osborne popped round to her friends Mrs Miliband there were nattering in what looked a poor student flat kitchen. All the politicos knew they were lying as they had been to hus house for dinner.
It is often forgotten by those of us who in hindsight think the 2015 election went the wrong way, that Miliband wasn’t just taken to pieces by the right wing press (though he was) but he also walked into a lot of clangers regarding his public image which made him look try-hard and awkward. A lot of politicians waste a lot of capital fighting the last war, and one of the things Labour tried to do with Miliband was to turn him into a replica of the young, charismatic, sleeves-rolled-up, charming, unthreatening image that Cameron had managed to build. And it just wasn’t the right fit for him.
Tories made the same mistake last time out, having Sunak doing stunts that were clearly designed for a Johnson or Truss character.
They got the spin all wrong for Sunak. It was difficult as Sunak being uber wealthy during cost of living crisis is rather hard sell, but he actually had a heart warming story to tell about his immigrant family and they made a success of themselves through hard work. But trying to play him as play of the people isn't going to cut it nor yaaa booo crash the JCB type stuff that Boris would do.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
Surgeon who destroyed his legs, and had them amputated, because of a fetish, then indulged in insurance fraud as an add-on, and ended up with years in prison.
When I interviewed surgeon Neil Hopper in 2023 for BBC News, I believed I was speaking to a man who had been humbled by the life-changing experience of losing his legs to sepsis.
Little did I know, Hopper had a sexual interest in amputation and had frozen his own legs so they would be removed.
Hopper, a consultant vascular surgeon who had carried out hundreds of amputation operations, told me he had come down with a mystery illness on a family camping trip which had led to sepsis and below-knee amputations of both his legs.
In reality, he had used ice and dry ice to freeze his own legs, causing damage that meant they eventually had to be amputated in hospital,
I wonder if all those amputations he had carried out were all necessary.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
Remember the Thick of It episode at the Party Conference.....
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
She shouldn’t be there at all. Reform seem to think they can walk on water and can get away with anything at the moment .
Cyanobacteria are probably the most numerous taxon to have ever existed on Earth and the first organisms known to have produced oxygen,[11] having appeared in the middle Archean eon and apparently originated in a freshwater or terrestrial environment.[12][13] Their photopigments can absorb the red- and blue-spectrum frequencies of sunlight (thus reflecting a greenish color) to split water molecules into hydrogen ions and oxygen. The hydrogen ions are used to react with carbon dioxide to produce complex organic compounds such as carbohydrates (a process known as carbon fixation), and the oxygen is released as a byproduct. By continuously producing and releasing oxygen over billions of years, cyanobacteria are thought to have converted the early Earth's anoxic, weakly reducing prebiotic atmosphere, into an oxidizing one with free gaseous oxygen (which previously would have been immediately removed by various surface reductants), resulting in the Great Oxidation Event and the "rusting of the Earth" during the early Proterozoic,[14] dramatically changing the composition of life forms on Earth.
There are no politicians who have done anything so useful. Instead of making free oxygen and food, politicians consume both.
Surgeon who destroyed his legs, and had them amputated, because of a fetish, then indulged in insurance fraud as an add-on, and ended up with years in prison.
When I interviewed surgeon Neil Hopper in 2023 for BBC News, I believed I was speaking to a man who had been humbled by the life-changing experience of losing his legs to sepsis.
Little did I know, Hopper had a sexual interest in amputation and had frozen his own legs so they would be removed.
Hopper, a consultant vascular surgeon who had carried out hundreds of amputation operations, told me he had come down with a mystery illness on a family camping trip which had led to sepsis and below-knee amputations of both his legs.
In reality, he had used ice and dry ice to freeze his own legs, causing damage that meant they eventually had to be amputated in hospital,
I wonder if all those amputations he had carried out were all necessary.
A bit like the transgender surgery trend of the past few years.
Surgeon who destroyed his legs, and had them amputated, because of a fetish, then indulged in insurance fraud as an add-on, and ended up with years in prison.
When I interviewed surgeon Neil Hopper in 2023 for BBC News, I believed I was speaking to a man who had been humbled by the life-changing experience of losing his legs to sepsis.
Little did I know, Hopper had a sexual interest in amputation and had frozen his own legs so they would be removed.
Hopper, a consultant vascular surgeon who had carried out hundreds of amputation operations, told me he had come down with a mystery illness on a family camping trip which had led to sepsis and below-knee amputations of both his legs.
In reality, he had used ice and dry ice to freeze his own legs, causing damage that meant they eventually had to be amputated in hospital,
I wonder if all those amputations he had carried out were all necessary.
Ranulph Fiennes famously loped off chunks of his fingers with a saw in the garden shed when it sounds like they were only going to remove the tips.
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Yes but the narrative of those hostile to Rayner is to paint as negative a picture of her as possible to forestall any attempt at rehabilitation in a year or two.
The fact remains she breached the Ministerial Code and that made her position untenable. Whether said Code is fit for purpose is another question - we want to ensure Government is as free as possible from allegations of corruption or inappropriate influence such as from third party lobbying companies - but the notion complex non-Government related private financial transactions need to be held to such a high standard - well, I understand why many would wish our Ministers to be beyond any kind of reproach especially since the Expenses Scandal - doesn't sit well with me and some latitude for genuine errors should exist (as distinct from deliberate and planned tax evasion).
She was a damn fool not to seek further advice as recommended.
But I'm remembering how but for a chance conversation with my accountant I would once have ended up paying the wrong rate of stamp duty too, and it would never even have crossed my mind to check.
There but for the grace of God...
Most of the population will have had similar experiences. The whole thing has essentially been a nonsense.
But an important political job dione by the Telegraph, with which they are very obviously delighted.
Hardly nonsense but it wasn't just the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The question remains who did the leaking and their motive ?
The other question remains how Starmer so quickly changed his cabinet if he hadn't known this was coming.
He is also a winner here
Could it be Starmer himself, via an intermediary? He doesn't appear to like female MPs from Greater Manchester in his cabinet/shadow cabinet. Nandy is the only one of the original 4 left (Long-Bailey was dismissed a while ago) and he is suspected to regard Nandy with contempt too.
Starmer appears to have a women problem full stop.
That'll be why the CoE, HS and FS are all women? First time ever, I read, that the three great offices of state have been held by women.
But are they the three best people available to Starmer?
Not sure if yes or no is the worst answer.
Two out of the three have the hallmark of Dame Jacqui Smith about them. And yes there are better options out there.
As a friendly aside you do seem to have misremembered the likes of Priti Patel and Braverman made the highest offices of state too.
You seem to have misremembered that the party that had them was on the end of an almighty drubbing. A precedent you want to follow?
If Labour don't pull their finger out they deserve to get mullered. I only hope and pray it is not Reform or Jenrick/ Braverman Tories who do the mullering.
My understanding is the Korea has the best sunscreen, but due to regulator issues / expense / unwillingness of Western brands around testing the filter compounds, the ones used in Korean products which are vastly superior can't be used in Western products.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
She shouldn’t be there at all. Reform seem to think they can walk on water and can get away with anything at the moment .
She's being interviewed on the Platfprm by Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan:
BBC impartial balancing is alive and well. An absolute but justified crushing indictment on Labour's awful week yesterday, balanced with some loving promotion of Farage today.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
She shouldn’t be there at all. Reform seem to think they can walk on water and can get away with anything at the moment .
She's being interviewed on the Platfprm by Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan:
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
She shouldn’t be there at all. Reform seem to think they can walk on water and can get away with anything at the moment .
She's being interviewed on the Platfprm by Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan:
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
She shouldn’t be there at all. Reform seem to think they can walk on water and can get away with anything at the moment .
Labour should just ignore the Lucy Connolly stuff. Going after her won’t help matters at all, just sustain her time in the limelight and amplify the message she represents. They should get on with looking more widely at policing priorities etc, if the public feel the issue has been fixed then the Connolly debate will lose a lot of its sting.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Maybe if Labour keep calling the Reformers racists and thickies theyll all come back.
Perhaps they should also use that edgy Rupert Murdoch biscuits meme to show them how thick they are too. Bound to make them see the error of their ways
If I was the suspicious type I might have thought Starmer himself was the lawyer who gave Ange the advice! This has worked out perfectly for him. He's got a shiny new team none of whom eat peas with their knife. From a government POV this couldn't have worked out better. Angie was never up to the job and despite protestations Starmer's much more comfortable without that particular loose cannon swinging around Downing Street.....
....No the story is about Ange herself and the snobbery that brought her down. The Telegraph and Mail have been campaigning against her for months. Pure snobbery. Someone on here yesterday called her 'Gobby'. I'm afraid that's what females from her background who are climbing the ladder are having to put up with.It is so depressing.... Just another scalp for some double barrelled nobody at the Telegraph
If Labour and its supporters tell themselves that "snobbery that brought her down" then they're screwed. Rayner did something minorly wrong, but for a value that is eye-watering for many voters. She denied wrongdoing, and then tried to blame others. She was in denial. All MPs (of all parties, not just Labour) need to learn lessons from this. Many are too thick, or greedy, or self-important, to do so.
The government's media management, and management of its MPs, is awful. They need to fix this. They need to develop a few simple messages and deliver them effectively. Since Starmer is incapable of the messaging, they need someone else. Lammy isn't it.
I don't think Rayner did deny wrongdoing. She fessed up, and wanted to pay the £40k. And she promptly and quite graciously accepted the findings of the Independent Adviser, falling on her sword immediately and admitting she'd been negligent.
Rayner was naive and did not do this deliberately
Her problem was she didn't address it immediately and then blamed her solicitors and of course her own track record of condemning this type of behaviour
However, I think her supporters need to wonder who was leaking information not just to the Telegraph and Mail but also the Guardian
The initial leak of the Hove purchase was possibly a tip-off from an estate agent or member of the public, possibly via a reporter on the Hove Gazette (a fictional construct) because it has always been true that a local reporter with a juicy story's first thought is not hold the front page but is this my ticket into Fleet Street?
Once the fact of the Hove purchase is out, it immediately raises the question for any political hack, why is a northern MP who works in London buying in Hove? And from then it is either a hot gossip item because of her links to Sam Tarry who is based down there, or a political story because it hints at a chicken run.
So from the purchase all the way through to the reporting, this is not about separate conspiracies but a series of accidents forming a Greek tragedy.
Her choice of Hove is interesting. A world away from her drab origins in a Manchester slum to go to a rainbow flagged city that is perhaps the most socially liberal in the country. Her appearances on the Dance DJ and Pride events is not fake PR, she actually likes that stuff.
I suspect that there will be even more copying Farage and Trump by the Starmer team now that an important voice on Culture War issues has been relegated to the back benches.
Now we should ask the media to check if Ed Milliband has any dodgy housing issues.
Was Ed the one with two kitchens or was that David? I can't be bothered to check but according to TRiP, Ed Miliband was one of those who came out of the expenses scandal as squeaky-clean.
Ed had the two kitchens and yes he didn't do anything out of the ordinary with his expenses.
I always assumed the ”Two kitchens” thing was just coded anti-semitism. The endless reprinting of the picture of him eating a bacon sandwich likewise. Yes, it could be read as simply talking about a politicians property ownership, or a funny picture of them eating, but the underlying point was to remind readers that the Millibands were Jewish without saying so in a way that could be called out.
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
Actually it was 3 kitchens.
They had a mini-kitchen off the lounge upstairs for refreshments-whilst-lounging.
And there was an extra one in the basement, because iirc they had reincorporated a previously separate flat into the main house.
Remember the hate campaign against Ms Sturgeon for having a upmarket coffeewotsit in her kitchen.
Farage having a total car crash on Sky News . He can’t bear any proper scrutiny .
That will end up as Ref +2 though. Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
No if anyone saw that interview they’d think he’s making it up as he goes along . Now apparently the boats will stop two weeks after legislation passes , not two weeks after taking office which he spouted to the clapping seals yesterday . He doesn’t like scrutiny and he gets angry when any journalist asks difficult questions .
That’s it, reform is toast.
They’re not toast clearly because their base is similar to Maga . They’ll accept anything that Farage says , call any proper scrutiny a witch hunt and fake news.
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
The more Tommy R type solutions Reform go for, they pick up a few more 'flag' type votes but start to lose the grandma and grandpa end. In broad terms that is. The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
Lucy Connolly will, I'm sure, be cheered to the rafters when she speaks at today's Reform conference. I'm not sure it's wise of Farage to have invited her to speak, for the reasons you give.
Hope Nigel’s team have approved the speech, she could easily go all Tommy.
She shouldn’t be there at all. Reform seem to think they can walk on water and can get away with anything at the moment .
She's being interviewed on the Platfprm by Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan:
On the poll in the header, 7% was the government approval when Truss was booted, so time has not really healed positive feeling at all (disapproval was 82% though so disapproval might have subsided slightly as you might expect)
I am not sure that is a healthy thing to do. It isn't much of a university experience having your older sister take you to every lecture for 3 years.
Definitely not. Universities shouldn’t accept anyone under 17/18.
In most of these outlier cases they don't actually go on to be "special". It must also be a nightmare for the university in terms of safe guarding issues, they aren't really set up to handle minors mingling with adults.
Terence Tao is the one I can think of. But he wasn't just getting equivalent of A* in his A-Levels, he was winning the biggest international maths prizes against people 5-6 years older than him.
Comments
As a friendly aside you do seem to have misremembered the likes of Priti Patel and Braverman made the highest offices of state too.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/06/politics-latest-news-reform-uk-lucy-connolly-farage-tice/
I suppose Letby couldn't make it.
And they just told us it will be 12 months before they will even look at the next planning application (unless we pay for them to hire a consultant to work in their planning department).
Surgeon who destroyed his legs, and had them amputated, because of a fetish, then indulged in insurance fraud as an add-on, and ended up with years in prison.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0vr20gxvno
When I interviewed surgeon Neil Hopper in 2023 for BBC News, I believed I was speaking to a man who had been humbled by the life-changing experience of losing his legs to sepsis.
Little did I know, Hopper had a sexual interest in amputation and had frozen his own legs so they would be removed.
Hopper, a consultant vascular surgeon who had carried out hundreds of amputation operations, told me he had come down with a mystery illness on a family camping trip which had led to sepsis and below-knee amputations of both his legs.
In reality, he had used ice and dry ice to freeze his own legs, causing damage that meant they eventually had to be amputated in hospital,
If they go too hard on that route might it restrict their progress/be a stick for the others to beat them with? If they get painted successfully (however fairly or unfairly) as Abolish The Welsh Assembly then there will be a pretty low ceiling for them id think......
Apparently over 600 migrants today !!!!! [Saturday]
You may, obviously, think that I’m being wildly conspiratorial here, but given the Mail’s & other right wing press history I think it was probably deliberate in that alt-right edgy “look how easily triggered you are by my nodding & winking to anti-semitic tropes without actually saying them” kind of way.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/sep/05/rare-total-lunar-eclipse-blood-moon-to-be-visible-from-uk
Big Nige versus the establishment innit. Hes one of our own etc
Why is that do you think
PB Tories “Angela Rayner should have had a wide understanding of Trust law and deserves to go”.
Quelle surprise!
If other parties can display competence in the area then it will show him up as a chancer. But right now it will make little difference.
Labour and the conservatives have to lift their game but that will take a considerable time even if they can
Who is labour's Nadine Dorries?
They just dont see that he IS what they want freeing from. Hes no more an Insurgent than Michael Howard or Tony Blair.
Failed career Tories ain't revolutionaries and they love his tobacco backside
Labour and the Tories need to try and get back some of the Reform support which is softer and still lives in the real world .
Labour have a country to run and the Tories have been around for 350 years and are HM opposition. Their contant blubbing (the politicians and party not anyone here) because they might lose seats etc is getting very old. Grow a set and fight for some votes and stop shitting yourself because Lee Anderson might be under the bed making 30p soup
They had a mini-kitchen off the lounge upstairs for refreshments-whilst-lounging.
And there was an extra one in the basement, because iirc they had reincorporated a previously separate flat into the main house.
Then he started lying saying well we don't really use the downstairs kitchen, but people pointed out the one they showed was missing everything you would need if you wanted more than to make cups of tea and beans on toast.
I doubt when Mrs Osborne popped round to her friends Mrs Miliband there were nattering in what looked a poor student flat kitchen. All the politicos knew they were lying as they had been to hus house for dinner.
In broad terms that is.
The sort of rhetoric starting (not egregiously but its there) to come out in this conference might start to drive away some of the grey vote theyve hoovered up
@TheScreamingEagles by constrast has one kitchen and a flotilla of staff to carry the food around
Anything will do.
I am however saying Labourites like Clive Lewis making statements re flags is not going to win back votes.
The simple facts is these days Labour represent the well to do classes and trying to portray the Tories or Farage as the poshos isnt credible when your own supporters are packed with well- heeled people.
All the data we have are that there are very few Lab to Ref switchers since last year.
It's mainly Lab to Lib/Green/shrug and Con to Ref.
Can the Conservatives win back people who, despite everything, voted for them in 2024? Tricky. Can they do so without becoming Reform? Probably impossible, and if they do- what's the point?
One of the curiosities is that a lot of parties seem a bit ashamed of who their actual electorate are.
If I remember correctly, they also had either a nanny or basically full time help (as Mrs Miliband has her own very success career) and when they arrived for the interview the "help" was outside cleaning the car. I think it was most likely the sparse kitchen shown was actually the "helps" kitchen to make teas and snacks.
But Miliband was trying to portray himself as man of the people vs Cameron the elite.
When you're explaining that your second kitchen is not really a kitchen, you're losing #EdsUneasyDiner
— Jonathan Freedland (@Freedland) March 12, 2015
https://x.com/Freedland/status/576109733884649472?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
EdM knows what it's like not to know where your next meal is coming from.
— John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) March 12, 2015
https://x.com/JohnRentoul/status/576089772021690368?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
I really think papers should spend more time writing about MPs with second jobs rather than second hobs!
— David Prescott (@DavidPrescott) March 12, 2015
https://x.com/DavidPrescott/status/576083880312209408?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
The first one is where stuff actually gets cooked, and the second is where you take photos of your fancy island.
Labour need to start shoring up their vote in London and the industrial North
LibDems just work the arse out of what they hold plus a few targets
And they all need to play business as usual. They are as guilty of feeding the dragon as anyone (maybe not the LDs tbf)
Sounds like you're trying to convince yourself.
There's some data here:
Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority Election
North Lincolnshire Council count:
HORSCROFT, Sally Anne, The Green Party – 1,604
JENKYNS, Andrea Marie, Reform UK – 12,993
OVERTON, Marianne Jane, Lincolnshire Independents – 977
STOCKWOOD, Jason, Labour and Co-operative Party – 4,825
WALTHAM, Rob, Local Conservatives – 14,003
YOUNG, Trevor, Liberal Democrats – 1021
https://www.northlincs.gov.uk/your-council/elections-and-voting/
And Reform didn't win the Runcorn byelection without gaining former Labour voters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Runcorn_and_Helsby_by-election
Its why I have no issue with Rayner buying a flat for £800k (might be stretching himself a bit thin, but that's her risk to take). She was making the sort of money that affords you that.
The main thing in such places is that building is cheap and there is next to no NIMBYism. I mean, in Northern Peru, you *could* try to stop your neighbour building a house. But I wouldn’t recommend it.
At this time of year the red varietal parts of the vineyard look properly bacchanalian. The white grapes less so, for now.
Harvest in mid October.
I think it will be a big leap forward for English wine. Indeed all fruit seems to be having a bumper year.
One of the most common inhabitants of "scum" are cyanobateria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria There are no politicians who have done anything so useful. Instead of making free oxygen and food, politicians consume both.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzl41rpdqo
My understanding is the Korea has the best sunscreen, but due to regulator issues / expense / unwillingness of Western brands around testing the filter compounds, the ones used in Korean products which are vastly superior can't be used in Western products.
Mrs Connolly will speak on the main stage of Reform’s conference in a special live recording of The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast with Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/06/lucy-connolly-to-speak-at-reform-conference/
BBC impartial balancing is alive and well. An absolute but justified crushing indictment on Labour's awful week yesterday, balanced with some loving promotion of Farage today.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79l9j79qyjo
I am not sure that is a healthy thing to do. It isn't much of a university experience having your older sister take you to every lecture for 3 years.
TEBAY SERVICES!!!
You guys weren’t joking
Terence Tao is the one I can think of. But he wasn't just getting equivalent of A* in his A-Levels, he was winning the biggest international maths prizes against people 5-6 years older than him.