The hard bit for Farage will be keeping up the pretence that he is an everyman anti-elite crusader. Difficult to do when you are part of the elite. If not this then something else - and it may well be policy.
If the current trend continues and refuk continue to lead, their policy positions will come under scrutiny.
Policy can win or lose an election, even if people agree with the policies they have to agree with the person saying them. Ask Jeremy Corbyn about this - popular policies until you say whose they are.
Farage has the inverse problem - the popular guy who will Fix People's Problems. But as we get into actual detail and people start to actually think, how much of this will survive as people have it explained to them in black and white how the Nigel's policies are the exact opposite of what they expect? How voting Reform will make their lives worse, not better?
I expect "fake news" to be used a lot to try and explain away awkward facts...
Good morning
It worked for Starmer [ Ming vase] and look where we are now
To be honest I think Farage will find it difficult to gain a majority, but then if Labour with Starmer continue on the same path then they are putting in a lot of groundwork for Farage to win
As far as his girlfriend's flat is concerned I doubt he will be found to have done anything wrong though many seem to think this is the 'gotcha'
Hasn't the groundwork for the Reform surge mostly been done by the Conservative party?
Good try but the first 15 months of Starmer has turbo charged Farage
It’s been a fabulous team effort. It is worth remembering however, on whose watch most of your average Reform voters complaints manifested. PC culture and the rise of DEI. Mass migration bidding down wages. Illegal migration changing the nature of society. Fiscal incontinence monetised by sleight of hand, bidding up property prices and squeezing government budgets. The dismantling of defence capability. The rise in property crime. The political weaponisation of super injunctions. The noses at the trough with government contracts Etc…
Do not misunderstand me, the new government is giving it a cracking go at being even worse. But it is hard to understand how anything other than misplaced brand loyalty is keeping the Tories in double figures in the polls.
It's very simple isn't it?
Reform exist because the Tories created a (large) gap in the market for a plausible party of right.
Reform are topping the polls because Starmer has been given an enormous majority, and has used it to do a particularly bad version of continuity Sunakism.
With both traditional the mainstream left and right parties mere shells of themselves, it's hardly surprising that Farage is king of all he surveys.
(This thing about his stamp duty seems to me to be a complete nothing-burger. Rayner's position was untenable mainly because it exposed her a sanctimonious hypocrite, who spent her life spouting hyperbolic utterances about tax avoidance, whilst evading tax herself. You can't sling that sort of mud at Farage, because he's never really been into that sort of mud-slinging, and therefore there isn't the hypocrity angle.)
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I coukd walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Can you count them on the six fingers of one hand?
Slightly long post. But there's a lot of concern on the moderate Left today about the Robinson event. Fine. But if you actually want to do something about it you have to understand four things:
1) To deal with the underlaying causes requires hard policy proscriptions on areas like immigration. And you will have to endorse positions that make you instinctively uncomfortable. But they are unavoidable.
2) The Blue Sky experiment has failed. You may hate Musk. But this is the most influential platform on the globe. If you abandon it to Robinson and his allies you have already lost.
I've been convinced for ages that labelling people with different opinions as hard right is dangerous. They get used to the epithet and eventually it becomes a badge of honour, which makes those who really are hard right seem attractive to them.
It's the same as diluting the charge of racism. When it's used against people who have a mountain of historical facts on their side and who point out Cleopatra wasn't black, it becomes effectively meaningless.
But throwing a slur of bigotry (including being far left/right) can be convenient because it means that an argument doesn't have to be made against the beliefs of that person. Instead, you just stamp "bigot" on their forehead, point at them, and remark how wrong they are.
The downside, as we also saw with the EU referendum, is that never making an argument to back up your beliefs or counter those of opponents means politicians, and others, can get rather rusty at both promoting the advantages of their own perspective and pointing out the weaknesses of others.
There is a balance. You don't want to dilute the charge of racism, but nor should you shy away from calling racist people racist. We shouldn't be tiptoeing around the behaviour of the likes of Elon Musk or Tommy Robinson. And while you shouldn't speak ill of the recently deceased, let's not pretend that Charlie Kirk wasn't anti-Semitic.
Slightly long post. But there's a lot of concern on the moderate Left today about the Robinson event. Fine. But if you actually want to do something about it you have to understand four things:
2) The Blue Sky experiment has failed.
I didn't realise it had got as far as an experiment. A plaything for the bien pensant 1% more like.
You're right. Hang them. How dare they.
Hanging's too good for them. But don't expect anyone to take what they say seriously. It is, or seems to be from Scott's prolific posting from the place, a cosy virtue-signalling club for people who agree with each other.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Very interesting. There appears to be a contradiction between a crowd of - let's say xenophobic - people being nevertheless motivated by a faith largely driven by immigrants.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
My father in law is the former head of the primary school my eldest two attend. I've been surprised at how many of their classmates' parents are people my father in law used to teach. My wife being one of them, of course - she has lived in two other countries since graduating*, but now lives 5 miles from her childhood home and her kids go to her old primary school.
*so not your (stereo)typical never left trajectory - and we met far from here; it was my job that brought us back to the area
The pb Tories who did not bark in the night time. Is it just me who noticed that of all our party leaders, it is only Kemi who had a good week?
Keir Starmer – under attack from his own side over his lack of political judgement or even plain common sense when appointing and then backing up to the last moment Lord Mandelson who has now had to resign three times for what was, at least to a first approximation, the same pattern of behaviour, being entranced by men considerably richer than him: Geoffrey Robinson, the Hindujas, Jeffrey Epstein. (On second thoughts, who better to inveigle himself into the inner circle of a billionaire property developer and cryptocurrency grifter?)
Ed Davey – the honourable member for falling in the water is being criticised by his own side for irrelevant stunts.
Nigel Farage – stamp duty obviously but also risks being outflanked by Tommy Robinson who attracted somewhere north of 100,000 largely peaceful protestors to London, along with squillionaire cheque-writer Elon Musk.
Kemi Badenoch – widely praised for an excellent PMQs and now can lay claim to two top Labour scalps.
And where were pb's Conservatives? Arguing about crowd sizes and frantically trawling the interwebs for a culture war about the assassination of a man who this time last week they could not have picked out of a police line-up even if he wore his MAGA hat. Poor old Kemi.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.
Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
Interesting. Just to qualify one point. In Cumberland (non lake district part) it is completely normal for people of all ages never to have lived anywhere else but their home town/village and immediate locality. I suspect this is true of a number of not much noticed parts of the country.
There is a also a substantial younger group of people for who this is true except for the years 18-21 approx away at HE of some sort.
Another feather in Clarkson's Farm's cap is that it introduced Caleb, and the fact that there are many, many Calebs, to the sneering metropolitan elite. Notwithstanding he is now a celeb with a book deal, speaking tour, and whatnot, at the time he was clear that he had likely not travelled further than Chipping Norton his whole life.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I coukd walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Can you count them on the six fingers of one hand?
You know when I was sat on my teetermatorter with an old mawkin having a mardle he told me six comes after five and I thought that was a rum old job
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I could walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Edit - no im wrong, there was a brief period just before my birth my mum and dad were elsewhere but that brief period aside......
That's interesting, and I think more typical than me: I had one grandparent from each of London, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh. A couple of generations before that and almost every region of the country is represented.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Very interesting. There appears to be a contradiction between a crowd of - let's say xenophobic - people being nevertheless motivated by a faith largely driven by immigrants.
Not if they are white Catholics from Poland, for instance.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Sociology of religion in the UK is generally for anoraks only, as in general it doesn't interact much with money, sex (yes I know), fame, and power but USA is different and one or two people may want to bring it here.
In particular no-one up to about last week has mass mobilised the possibility of aggressive, nationalist, racist, faithless, doctrine free, flag waving, crusader, 'Jesus, guns and babies' versions of Christianity.
Some reports from the weekend suggest someone wants to change that. If so, a rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem.
The old maids cycling, the migrant communities who make up so many of the (sane) evangelical and Roman catholic flocks now, and the liberal well meaning, flower arranging, coffee morning organising, rota arranging, psalm chanting middle class (guilty as charged) had better get themselves defended with their hassocks.
Indeed. The overtly Christian-radical aspect combined with violence hasn't been seen for centuries in demonstrations in England, as far as understood.
Not remarked upon enough, and a boomerang effect from Puritan radicalism in America.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.
Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.
'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
My father in law lives in the house he bought new in the 1950s. We are trying to lever him out but it isn't working.
It's interesting how often politicians who sounded rubbish when they were in office become sensible once they've left Government.
Lord Gove, who, apparently held several positions in the Conservative administrations from 2010-24 (it's too early), has told the Independent Commission on Community Cohesion (chaired jointly by Sadiq Javid and Jon Cruddas) the Cameron Government was wrong to remove or water down the ASBOs of the Blair Government just to satisfy civil libertarians.
Once we get past this mea culpa, we then get this piece of wisdom from the former MP for what is now the Liberal Democrat stronghold of Surrey Heath:
He also emphasised the need for civic participation, but said this would be “very, very difficult for the state or its agencies to encourage”.
“The more that lads and dads are going to football together. The more that people are going to places of worship and joining in the activities around that, the better overall.
“But you can’t make people love football, you can’t enforce good parenting, you can’t make people want to take part in a rich civic life if they don’t want to.
“And there are bigger social trends which are encouraging atomisation so that the 11-year-old who might have been going to watch QPR 20 or 30 years ago is now more likely to be playing Fifa at home.”
He said the “right mix” of shops on high streets was key to encouraging a sense of community, adding that “people feel that high streets that have, again, vape shops, Turkish barbers, charity shops and voids in particular are a problem”.
Our politics is a reflection of our life and the way we live and those who marched on the "Unite the Kingdom" protest weren't just a bunch of knuckleheaded racists (undoubtedly there were some) but people desperate to claim or reclaim a sense of identity, of belonging, even of purpose. When you don't recognise the place in which you live and you don't understand the world in which you're living, it's natural to become frustrated and angry.
You might argue (and I'd have some sympathy) an element of this is romanticised nostalgia much as "back to basics" was 30+ years go but the truth is people need to feel comfortable with the world and their place in it. Rapid technological and socio-economic change has happened before and people have protested against it (often violently) and this is another phase. We can't uninvent mobile phones, the Internet, supermarkets or online gaming any more than we can the internal combustion engine - it's about how people, society and politics adapt to change rather than trying to turn the clock back.
To pick up on a very minor point, I don't think charity shops are a problem. They can be hubs of community volunteering, and they offer cheap goods for those affected by the cost of living.
It's not really that they're a problem in themselves - just that they are among the very few legitimate retailers who can continue on provincial high streets without going bust, as they're subsidised retail.
Them, and the odd fast food outlet, which is missing from Gove's list.
A mental stroll down an actual local street gives me ...vape shops, Turkish barbers, small newsagents (any of which are not entirely unlikely to be money laundering fronts), fast food outlets, charity shops, and voids.
Charity shops are not so much subsidised retail as the tax and other costs are reduced to the point they can survive.
If you want high street shops, then the costs and tax need to be reduced to match.
By the way, several of the big charity shop chains do the following - the managers are given targets to get volunteers in to reduce the number of paid hours. In some cases, workers show up for a paid shift to be told that enough volunteers have signed up, so they are sent home. Not very charitable sounding, is it?
Our town has a number of empty shops. at least one of which has been empty since pre 2020. The owner cannot be making money out of it, yet is seemingly happy to have it vacant. Surely any income is better than none?
Some shops are owned by property funds that would sooner leave a unit empty than break their rule of upwards only rents, in case it starts a precedent for their other renters.
Easiest way of destroying the value of your property fund - reduce the rent on a property as everyone else in the centre will insist on the same deal come renewal.
And yes I know its exactly what Fairliered is saying but reality is until a shopping centre is virtually empty even a site with 1 or 2 occupied units can look far healthier to the fund than a full centre where the rents are low.
It's why forcing empty sites to be rented via an open auction is the best ways of filling our town centres up with shops, no fund is going to willingly admit their paper valuation for a centre is a work of fiction.
Town centres like that need to be filled with residents, rather than shops. The old style high street simply isn't viable any more in many places - at the same time as we have an acute housing shortage.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
My father moved from South Wales to South Essex in the 30's, and my mother moved from from Hertfordshire to South Essex. I came back to South Essex after student days and brought my wife, a Lancashire girl, with me. Now we live in North/Mid Essex. My sister moved to Scotland on marriage, then, after many years to the Channel Islands. Now she's in a Care Home in SW London near one of her daughters. My eldest son lives in Kent, my younger one in Thailand, both with families.
I was brought up on Canvey Island, where the touchstone of being a 'genuine' Islander was, in my day anyway "Were (or more likely Was) you here in the (1953) Flood?"
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I could walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Edit - no im wrong, there was a brief period just before my birth my mum and dad were elsewhere but that brief period aside......
That's interesting, and I think more typical than me: I had one grandparent from each of London, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh. A couple of generations before that and almost every region of the country is represented.
My paternal grandmother's family two generations back were Scots, my maternal grandmother and both grandfathers go at least 3 and 4 generations back in Norfolk (and likely more given how it used to be)
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
My mother has lived in the same house for well over six decades.
The pb Tories who did not bark in the night time. Is it just me who noticed that of all our party leaders, it is only Kemi who had a good week?
Keir Starmer – under attack from his own side over his lack of political judgement or even plain common sense when appointing and then backing up to the last moment Lord Mandelson who has now had to resign three times for what was, at least to a first approximation, the same pattern of behaviour, being entranced by men considerably richer than him: Geoffrey Robinson, the Hindujas, Jeffrey Epstein. (On second thoughts, who better to inveigle himself into the inner circle of a billionaire property developer and cryptocurrency grifter?)
Ed Davey – the honourable member for falling in the water is being criticised by his own side for irrelevant stunts.
Nigel Farage – stamp duty obviously but also risks being outflanked by Tommy Robinson who attracted somewhere north of 100,000 largely peaceful protestors to London, along with squillionaire cheque-writer Elon Musk.
Kemi Badenoch – widely praised for an excellent PMQs and now can lay claim to two top Labour scalps.
And where were pb's Conservatives? Arguing about crowd sizes and frantically trawling the interwebs for a culture war about the assassination of a man who this time last week they could not have picked out of a police line-up even if he wore his MAGA hat. Poor old Kemi.
Tbf I doubt Kemi gives much of a crap what pb notices!
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
Interesting. Just to qualify one point. In Cumberland (non lake district part) it is completely normal for people of all ages never to have lived anywhere else but their home town/village and immediate locality. I suspect this is true of a number of not much noticed parts of the country.
There is a also a substantial younger group of people for who this is true except for the years 18-21 approx away at HE of some sort.
Another feather in Clarkson's Farm's cap is that it introduced Caleb, and the fact that there are many, many Calebs, to the sneering metropolitan elite. Notwithstanding he is now a celeb with a book deal, speaking tour, and whatnot, at the time he was clear that he had likely not travelled further than Chipping Norton his whole life.
When I lived in Barbados (which is twenty one miles long and fourteen miles across) I was told that there were people living in the interior of the country who had never been to the coast. This may have been hyperbole I suppose, although some of the rural communities in parishes like St George and St John were pretty isolated. The Bajan whites (descendents from indentured servants, often Scots and Irish political prisoners, almost on a par with slaves) were often the most isolated, it seemed. Some people really don't like leaving the place they feel comfortable.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
My father moved from South Wales to South Essex in the 30's, and my mother moved from from Hertfordshire to South Essex. I came back to South Essex after student days and brought my wife, a Lancashire girl, with me. Now we live in North/Mid Essex. My sister moved to Scotland on marriage, then, after many years to the Channel Islands. Now she's in a Care Home in SW London near one of her daughters. My eldest son lives in Kent, my younger one in Thailand, both with families.
I was brought up on Canvey Island, where the touchstone of being a 'genuine' Islander was, in my day anyway "Were (or more likely Was) you here in the (1953) Flood?"
A similar touchstone exists (or did) in North Norfolk and round the coast, but especially North Norfolk where second homers are a plague
The pb Tories who did not bark in the night time. Is it just me who noticed that of all our party leaders, it is only Kemi who had a good week?
Keir Starmer – under attack from his own side over his lack of political judgement or even plain common sense when appointing and then backing up to the last moment Lord Mandelson who has now had to resign three times for what was, at least to a first approximation, the same pattern of behaviour, being entranced by men considerably richer than him: Geoffrey Robinson, the Hindujas, Jeffrey Epstein. (On second thoughts, who better to inveigle himself into the inner circle of a billionaire property developer and cryptocurrency grifter?)
Ed Davey – the honourable member for falling in the water is being criticised by his own side for irrelevant stunts.
Nigel Farage – stamp duty obviously but also risks being outflanked by Tommy Robinson who attracted somewhere north of 100,000 largely peaceful protestors to London, along with squillionaire cheque-writer Elon Musk.
Kemi Badenoch – widely praised for an excellent PMQs and now can lay claim to two top Labour scalps.
And where were pb's Conservatives? Arguing about crowd sizes and frantically trawling the interwebs for a culture war about the assassination of a man who this time last week they could not have picked out of a police line-up even if he wore his MAGA hat. Poor old Kemi.
Badenoch probably has had her best week since becoming leader but I’d hesitate to say that she was wholly responsible for the PMQs. Yes, she turned up more prepared and yes she asked the right questions (though got a bit sidetracked at the end) but it was a huge open goal given that Starmer turned up to PMQs on the back foot and made a bad situation even worse by putting in a very poor performance.
In truth the problem for Kemi is she won’t get any potential credit until she tries to answer the question about what the Tories are for, and what they offer as an alternative.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
The pb Tories who did not bark in the night time. Is it just me who noticed that of all our party leaders, it is only Kemi who had a good week?
Keir Starmer – under attack from his own side over his lack of political judgement or even plain common sense when appointing and then backing up to the last moment Lord Mandelson who has now had to resign three times for what was, at least to a first approximation, the same pattern of behaviour, being entranced by men considerably richer than him: Geoffrey Robinson, the Hindujas, Jeffrey Epstein. (On second thoughts, who better to inveigle himself into the inner circle of a billionaire property developer and cryptocurrency grifter?)
Ed Davey – the honourable member for falling in the water is being criticised by his own side for irrelevant stunts.
Nigel Farage – stamp duty obviously but also risks being outflanked by Tommy Robinson who attracted somewhere north of 100,000 largely peaceful protestors to London, along with squillionaire cheque-writer Elon Musk.
Kemi Badenoch – widely praised for an excellent PMQs and now can lay claim to two top Labour scalps.
And where were pb's Conservatives? Arguing about crowd sizes and frantically trawling the interwebs for a culture war about the assassination of a man who this time last week they could not have picked out of a police line-up even if he wore his MAGA hat. Poor old Kemi.
I've written to Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, urging them to join me in condemning Elon Musk's dangerous remarks inciting violence yesterday.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
Come on Nick, you are doing PB wrong! You are meant to (a) never admit being wrong and (b) argue to your death that you were right...
I'd be interested as to how they define 'foreign food' as the UK probably has the most diverse food culture on the planet. Does pizza count? Curry, Thai, Bengali, sushi?
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I could walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Edit - no im wrong, there was a brief period just before my birth my mum and dad were elsewhere but that brief period aside......
That's interesting, and I think more typical than me: I had one grandparent from each of London, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh. A couple of generations before that and almost every region of the country is represented.
It's a short walk to where one grandparent was born. A long walk to another. But the other two were hundreds of miles away. Matthew Goodwin would not consider me "White British", although that's what I tick on forms.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
Snap. Chicken tikka masala is basically an English dish, for instance.
Surely Making Plans for Nigel was just a Love Action for Ms Ferrari?
And now he is Being Boiled over it...
Yay, somebody spotted my subtle musical reference in the headline.
So subtle that you missed out half the line.
Fake News!
Look again.
Music trivia: the cocktail bar in question in the Human League song was on Glossop Road, Sheffield just by the Hallamshire Hospital. I think it was called Hanrahans.
My great grandma lived on Sheffield Road in Glossop
Is there anything to stop Farage's girlfriend selling the property and walking away with the money ?
If not then this story is going nowhere.
This is the bit I don’t understand about this story. If she owns all of the home, whether that money is gifted or not, isn’t that the end of it for tax purposes? (Waiting for someone very clever to correct me, and as always I am not a tax expert yadda yadda).
Optically, I can see it looks like an unusual arrangement and unusual arrangements always invite questions, though.
The 'allegation' seems to be that Farage has given the girlfriend the money to buy the house to avoid stamp duty.
Even if true that would mean the wealth change is:
Farage -£885k Girlfriend +£885k
So Farage would be risking a £885k financial loss in order to avoid paying £44k in tax.
Which would be more financial reckless than a Reform manifesto.
Farage has explicitly said he did not give his girlfriend the money.
(Of course, he had said he'd bought the house and that turned out not to be true...)
So how can Farage have avoided tax when he's not been involved in the financial transaction ?
This is the difference between Rayner and Farage - Rayner owns the Hove flat whereas Farage doesn't own the Clacton house.
Its likely (from those sniffing around the story) an 'original source of the funds' question
Which is a justifiable question.
Instead the focus is "did Farage dodge tax", when he didn't.
Farage claims he had nothing to do with the finance of the purchase. Which makes his engagement of an expert tax adviser to check 'they did everything correctly' somewhat odd
Given the recent result of not consulting an expert tax advisor, relating to property, consulting one to get ahead of any problem seems prudent.
Not if the purchase was nothing to do with you and you had no part in its funding
Which no one seems to believe.
As an opponent of Farage, I would say it is smart thing to do. For a relative small amount of money (a fraction of one celeb appearance for Farage) he gets legal cover. And so does his partner.
Taking advice does not exampt you from liability if something has been done wrong. There is no 'legal cover' from advice taken after the fact. Do or do not, there is no try
Taking legal advice after the fact would tell you if you had fucked up. And give you an opportunity to get in front of the story/legal problems.
Of course, taking advice in advance would be better.
It's interesting how often politicians who sounded rubbish when they were in office become sensible once they've left Government.
Lord Gove, who, apparently held several positions in the Conservative administrations from 2010-24 (it's too early), has told the Independent Commission on Community Cohesion (chaired jointly by Sadiq Javid and Jon Cruddas) the Cameron Government was wrong to remove or water down the ASBOs of the Blair Government just to satisfy civil libertarians.
Once we get past this mea culpa, we then get this piece of wisdom from the former MP for what is now the Liberal Democrat stronghold of Surrey Heath:
He also emphasised the need for civic participation, but said this would be “very, very difficult for the state or its agencies to encourage”.
“The more that lads and dads are going to football together. The more that people are going to places of worship and joining in the activities around that, the better overall.
“But you can’t make people love football, you can’t enforce good parenting, you can’t make people want to take part in a rich civic life if they don’t want to.
“And there are bigger social trends which are encouraging atomisation so that the 11-year-old who might have been going to watch QPR 20 or 30 years ago is now more likely to be playing Fifa at home.”
He said the “right mix” of shops on high streets was key to encouraging a sense of community, adding that “people feel that high streets that have, again, vape shops, Turkish barbers, charity shops and voids in particular are a problem”.
Our politics is a reflection of our life and the way we live and those who marched on the "Unite the Kingdom" protest weren't just a bunch of knuckleheaded racists (undoubtedly there were some) but people desperate to claim or reclaim a sense of identity, of belonging, even of purpose. When you don't recognise the place in which you live and you don't understand the world in which you're living, it's natural to become frustrated and angry.
You might argue (and I'd have some sympathy) an element of this is romanticised nostalgia much as "back to basics" was 30+ years go but the truth is people need to feel comfortable with the world and their place in it. Rapid technological and socio-economic change has happened before and people have protested against it (often violently) and this is another phase. We can't uninvent mobile phones, the Internet, supermarkets or online gaming any more than we can the internal combustion engine - it's about how people, society and politics adapt to change rather than trying to turn the clock back.
To pick up on a very minor point, I don't think charity shops are a problem. They can be hubs of community volunteering, and they offer cheap goods for those affected by the cost of living.
It's not really that they're a problem in themselves - just that they are among the very few legitimate retailers who can continue on provincial high streets without going bust, as they're subsidised retail.
Them, and the odd fast food outlet, which is missing from Gove's list.
A mental stroll down an actual local street gives me ...vape shops, Turkish barbers, small newsagents (any of which are not entirely unlikely to be money laundering fronts), fast food outlets, charity shops, and voids.
Charity shops are not so much subsidised retail as the tax and other costs are reduced to the point they can survive.
If you want high street shops, then the costs and tax need to be reduced to match.
By the way, several of the big charity shop chains do the following - the managers are given targets to get volunteers in to reduce the number of paid hours. In some cases, workers show up for a paid shift to be told that enough volunteers have signed up, so they are sent home. Not very charitable sounding, is it?
Our town has a number of empty shops. at least one of which has been empty since pre 2020. The owner cannot be making money out of it, yet is seemingly happy to have it vacant. Surely any income is better than none?
Some shops are owned by property funds that would sooner leave a unit empty than break their rule of upwards only rents, in case it starts a precedent for their other renters.
Easiest way of destroying the value of your property fund - reduce the rent on a property as everyone else in the centre will insist on the same deal come renewal.
And yes I know its exactly what Fairliered is saying but reality is until a shopping centre is virtually empty even a site with 1 or 2 occupied units can look far healthier to the fund than a full centre where the rents are low.
It's why forcing empty sites to be rented via an open auction is the best ways of filling our town centres up with shops, no fund is going to willingly admit their paper valuation for a centre is a work of fiction.
Town centres like that need to be filled with residents, rather than shops. The old style high street simply isn't viable any more in many places - at the same time as we have an acute housing shortage.
Our local shopping centre is pretty much empty, they have refilled it with leisure and gyms, a bouldering gym took up 1/4 of one level until the rent was increased, now it's empty again. Apparently the landlord is banking on a "we work" desk rental tenant !? The bouldering gym had coffee, powerpoints, desk space and free wifi.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Sociology of religion in the UK is generally for anoraks only, as in general it doesn't interact much with money, sex (yes I know), fame, and power but USA is different and one or two people may want to bring it here.
In particular no-one up to about last week has mass mobilised the possibility of aggressive, nationalist, racist, faithless, doctrine free, flag waving, crusader, 'Jesus, guns and babies' versions of Christianity.
Some reports from the weekend suggest someone wants to change that. If so, a rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem.
The old maids cycling, the migrant communities who make up so many of the (sane) evangelical and Roman catholic flocks now, and the liberal well meaning, flower arranging, coffee morning organising, rota arranging, psalm chanting middle class (guilty as charged) had better get themselves defended with their hassocks.
Trump the harbinger of a Second Coming? Couldn't they have booked someone else, a comedian perhaps so we could laugh in the face of danger.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.
Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.
'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'
Muslims see Jesus Christ as a prophet and Messiah, they just don't believe in the Trinity and that he is also the son of God
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
Snap. Chicken tikka masala is basically an English dish, for instance.
Are they counting fish 'n chips as a foreign food?
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I coukd walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Can you count them on the six fingers of one hand?
You know when I was sat on my teetermatorter with an old mawkin having a mardle he told me six comes after five and I thought that was a rum old job
Thass roight, owd bor! I remember being told a story about a pub in Ipswich called the Arboretum. Apparently, it was built on the site of an orchard. The foreman told a labourer to chop them down. When he asked the foreman what he should do with the apples, he was told, ah, bor, eatum.
The pb Tories who did not bark in the night time. Is it just me who noticed that of all our party leaders, it is only Kemi who had a good week?
Keir Starmer – under attack from his own side over his lack of political judgement or even plain common sense when appointing and then backing up to the last moment Lord Mandelson who has now had to resign three times for what was, at least to a first approximation, the same pattern of behaviour, being entranced by men considerably richer than him: Geoffrey Robinson, the Hindujas, Jeffrey Epstein. (On second thoughts, who better to inveigle himself into the inner circle of a billionaire property developer and cryptocurrency grifter?)
Ed Davey – the honourable member for falling in the water is being criticised by his own side for irrelevant stunts.
Nigel Farage – stamp duty obviously but also risks being outflanked by Tommy Robinson who attracted somewhere north of 100,000 largely peaceful protestors to London, along with squillionaire cheque-writer Elon Musk.
Kemi Badenoch – widely praised for an excellent PMQs and now can lay claim to two top Labour scalps.
And where were pb's Conservatives? Arguing about crowd sizes and frantically trawling the interwebs for a culture war about the assassination of a man who this time last week they could not have picked out of a police line-up even if he wore his MAGA hat. Poor old Kemi.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer and all that. Her performance at PMQs was noted but she had an open goal that even Diana Ross couldn’t miss. When she starts doing it week in week out and finds a strong coherent positioning for the party then she will get more support and confidence but she hasn’t been that inspiring so far, perhaps this will be the rocket boost she needs but one big PMQ win is just on PMQ win, and I don’t think anyone but the biggest Kemi supporter would try and claim the scalps as “hers”, the media took those scalps.
It's all gone a bit Who Do You Think You Are on here, hasn't it?
We can't be far from discovering that two posters share an aunt in Grimsby and inadvertently doxing ourselves
I've done quite of my family history, and while on the maternal side no-one seemed to move very far (from Bedford) until grandfather moved to Hertford around 1890 my paternal ancestors moved from agriculture in SW Wales to the mines of Glamorgan and then all over the place.
Some truth in that, had the Democrats nominated Bernie Sanders last year rather than Harris I suspect he would have run Trump closer than she did in rustbelt swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
The hard bit for Farage will be keeping up the pretence that he is an everyman anti-elite crusader. Difficult to do when you are part of the elite. If not this then something else - and it may well be policy.
If the current trend continues and refuk continue to lead, their policy positions will come under scrutiny.
Policy can win or lose an election, even if people agree with the policies they have to agree with the person saying them. Ask Jeremy Corbyn about this - popular policies until you say whose they are.
Farage has the inverse problem - the popular guy who will Fix People's Problems. But as we get into actual detail and people start to actually think, how much of this will survive as people have it explained to them in black and white how the Nigel's policies are the exact opposite of what they expect? How voting Reform will make their lives worse, not better?
I expect "fake news" to be used a lot to try and explain away awkward facts...
The idea that a member of the “elite” can’t represent the “non-elite” doesn’t pass the test of history.
Where did I say that? I said that he claims not to be the elite.
He is claiming to be "non-elite" in outlook, not personal wealth.
Just as Caesar (nobiles, family going back to the kings, immensely rich) claimed to be an outsider to the existing elite - which he was to an extent. His entire political career was in the face of The Establishment.
See all those who have followed him. All the way to Trump.
It seems difficult for those in conventional politics to realise - The Head Count see *everyone* at the top of politics as rich and powerful.
Angela Rayner is rich and powerful - to them. She earns multiple times their salary in their lifetime, will retire on a pension higher than their salaries, owns lots of property, mixes with the rich and powerful etc.
What the Head Count see is an In Group (Currently the Labour/Conservative/Lib Dem) which, to them seems to consist of identikit politicians, selling the same message. Those aspiring to be the Out Group are accepted as the Populares.
Distinctions that matter to members of the elite are irrelevant to the Head Count.
A senator would consider the Vetii of Pompeii as a part of the Plebs Sordida. To the Head Count, the Vetii would be rich beyond imagination.
Generally, ownership of a single slave was what distinguished the respectable poor from the Head Count. Ancient utopias were described as societies where even the meanest peasant or townsman could afford a slave.
It's interesting how often politicians who sounded rubbish when they were in office become sensible once they've left Government.
Lord Gove, who, apparently held several positions in the Conservative administrations from 2010-24 (it's too early), has told the Independent Commission on Community Cohesion (chaired jointly by Sadiq Javid and Jon Cruddas) the Cameron Government was wrong to remove or water down the ASBOs of the Blair Government just to satisfy civil libertarians.
Once we get past this mea culpa, we then get this piece of wisdom from the former MP for what is now the Liberal Democrat stronghold of Surrey Heath:
He also emphasised the need for civic participation, but said this would be “very, very difficult for the state or its agencies to encourage”.
“The more that lads and dads are going to football together. The more that people are going to places of worship and joining in the activities around that, the better overall.
“But you can’t make people love football, you can’t enforce good parenting, you can’t make people want to take part in a rich civic life if they don’t want to.
“And there are bigger social trends which are encouraging atomisation so that the 11-year-old who might have been going to watch QPR 20 or 30 years ago is now more likely to be playing Fifa at home.”
He said the “right mix” of shops on high streets was key to encouraging a sense of community, adding that “people feel that high streets that have, again, vape shops, Turkish barbers, charity shops and voids in particular are a problem”.
Our politics is a reflection of our life and the way we live and those who marched on the "Unite the Kingdom" protest weren't just a bunch of knuckleheaded racists (undoubtedly there were some) but people desperate to claim or reclaim a sense of identity, of belonging, even of purpose. When you don't recognise the place in which you live and you don't understand the world in which you're living, it's natural to become frustrated and angry.
You might argue (and I'd have some sympathy) an element of this is romanticised nostalgia much as "back to basics" was 30+ years go but the truth is people need to feel comfortable with the world and their place in it. Rapid technological and socio-economic change has happened before and people have protested against it (often violently) and this is another phase. We can't uninvent mobile phones, the Internet, supermarkets or online gaming any more than we can the internal combustion engine - it's about how people, society and politics adapt to change rather than trying to turn the clock back.
To pick up on a very minor point, I don't think charity shops are a problem. They can be hubs of community volunteering, and they offer cheap goods for those affected by the cost of living.
It's not really that they're a problem in themselves - just that they are among the very few legitimate retailers who can continue on provincial high streets without going bust, as they're subsidised retail.
Them, and the odd fast food outlet, which is missing from Gove's list.
A mental stroll down an actual local street gives me ...vape shops, Turkish barbers, small newsagents (any of which are not entirely unlikely to be money laundering fronts), fast food outlets, charity shops, and voids.
Charity shops are not so much subsidised retail as the tax and other costs are reduced to the point they can survive.
If you want high street shops, then the costs and tax need to be reduced to match.
By the way, several of the big charity shop chains do the following - the managers are given targets to get volunteers in to reduce the number of paid hours. In some cases, workers show up for a paid shift to be told that enough volunteers have signed up, so they are sent home. Not very charitable sounding, is it?
Our town has a number of empty shops. at least one of which has been empty since pre 2020. The owner cannot be making money out of it, yet is seemingly happy to have it vacant. Surely any income is better than none?
Some shops are owned by property funds that would sooner leave a unit empty than break their rule of upwards only rents, in case it starts a precedent for their other renters.
Easiest way of destroying the value of your property fund - reduce the rent on a property as everyone else in the centre will insist on the same deal come renewal.
And yes I know its exactly what Fairliered is saying but reality is until a shopping centre is virtually empty even a site with 1 or 2 occupied units can look far healthier to the fund than a full centre where the rents are low.
It's why forcing empty sites to be rented via an open auction is the best ways of filling our town centres up with shops, no fund is going to willingly admit their paper valuation for a centre is a work of fiction.
Town centres like that need to be filled with residents, rather than shops. The old style high street simply isn't viable any more in many places - at the same time as we have an acute housing shortage.
Our local shopping centre is pretty much empty, they have refilled it with leisure and gyms, a bouldering gym took up 1/4 of one level until the rent was increased, now it's empty again. Apparently the landlord is banking on a "we work" desk rental tenant !? The bouldering gym had coffee, powerpoints, desk space and free wifi.
Given the very large number of small towns facing similar problems, it would surely be fairly easy for government to fund some directed experiments to see what does and doesn't work ?
Converting retail into residential needs good design and provision of local services, though. Otherwise you risk creating the town centre equivalent of sink estates.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
Interesting. Just to qualify one point. In Cumberland (non lake district part) it is completely normal for people of all ages never to have lived anywhere else but their home town/village and immediate locality. I suspect this is true of a number of not much noticed parts of the country.
There is a also a substantial younger group of people for who this is true except for the years 18-21 approx away at HE of some sort.
Another feather in Clarkson's Farm's cap is that it introduced Caleb, and the fact that there are many, many Calebs, to the sneering metropolitan elite. Notwithstanding he is now a celeb with a book deal, speaking tour, and whatnot, at the time he was clear that he had likely not travelled further than Chipping Norton his whole life.
When I lived in Barbados (which is twenty one miles long and fourteen miles across) I was told that there were people living in the interior of the country who had never been to the coast. This may have been hyperbole I suppose, although some of the rural communities in parishes like St George and St John were pretty isolated. The Bajan whites (descendents from indentured servants, often Scots and Irish political prisoners, almost on a par with slaves) were often the most isolated, it seemed. Some people really don't like leaving the place they feel comfortable.
They'd never been to the Lone Star - can't believe it...
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
My father moved from South Wales to South Essex in the 30's, and my mother moved from from Hertfordshire to South Essex. I came back to South Essex after student days and brought my wife, a Lancashire girl, with me. Now we live in North/Mid Essex. My sister moved to Scotland on marriage, then, after many years to the Channel Islands. Now she's in a Care Home in SW London near one of her daughters. My eldest son lives in Kent, my younger one in Thailand, both with families.
I was brought up on Canvey Island, where the touchstone of being a 'genuine' Islander was, in my day anyway "Were (or more likely Was) you here in the (1953) Flood?"
I remember my grandmother's yard (but not house, thankfully) being flooded on Canvey, probably early seventies. But my family are all East End and before that, Essex.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
Very good quote from my current favourite book (because I've only just finished it), Kill all Normies, by Angela Nagle:
"Liberals don't believe in actual politics any more, just bearing witness to suffering. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics."
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
Snap. Chicken tikka masala is basically an English dish, for instance.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
I don't want to eat any of this foreign muck. I'll stick to pizza, kebabs and curry.
It's interesting how often politicians who sounded rubbish when they were in office become sensible once they've left Government.
Lord Gove, who, apparently held several positions in the Conservative administrations from 2010-24 (it's too early), has told the Independent Commission on Community Cohesion (chaired jointly by Sadiq Javid and Jon Cruddas) the Cameron Government was wrong to remove or water down the ASBOs of the Blair Government just to satisfy civil libertarians.
Once we get past this mea culpa, we then get this piece of wisdom from the former MP for what is now the Liberal Democrat stronghold of Surrey Heath:
He also emphasised the need for civic participation, but said this would be “very, very difficult for the state or its agencies to encourage”.
“The more that lads and dads are going to football together. The more that people are going to places of worship and joining in the activities around that, the better overall.
“But you can’t make people love football, you can’t enforce good parenting, you can’t make people want to take part in a rich civic life if they don’t want to.
“And there are bigger social trends which are encouraging atomisation so that the 11-year-old who might have been going to watch QPR 20 or 30 years ago is now more likely to be playing Fifa at home.”
He said the “right mix” of shops on high streets was key to encouraging a sense of community, adding that “people feel that high streets that have, again, vape shops, Turkish barbers, charity shops and voids in particular are a problem”.
Our politics is a reflection of our life and the way we live and those who marched on the "Unite the Kingdom" protest weren't just a bunch of knuckleheaded racists (undoubtedly there were some) but people desperate to claim or reclaim a sense of identity, of belonging, even of purpose. When you don't recognise the place in which you live and you don't understand the world in which you're living, it's natural to become frustrated and angry.
You might argue (and I'd have some sympathy) an element of this is romanticised nostalgia much as "back to basics" was 30+ years go but the truth is people need to feel comfortable with the world and their place in it. Rapid technological and socio-economic change has happened before and people have protested against it (often violently) and this is another phase. We can't uninvent mobile phones, the Internet, supermarkets or online gaming any more than we can the internal combustion engine - it's about how people, society and politics adapt to change rather than trying to turn the clock back.
To pick up on a very minor point, I don't think charity shops are a problem. They can be hubs of community volunteering, and they offer cheap goods for those affected by the cost of living.
It's not really that they're a problem in themselves - just that they are among the very few legitimate retailers who can continue on provincial high streets without going bust, as they're subsidised retail.
Them, and the odd fast food outlet, which is missing from Gove's list.
A mental stroll down an actual local street gives me ...vape shops, Turkish barbers, small newsagents (any of which are not entirely unlikely to be money laundering fronts), fast food outlets, charity shops, and voids.
Charity shops are not so much subsidised retail as the tax and other costs are reduced to the point they can survive.
If you want high street shops, then the costs and tax need to be reduced to match.
By the way, several of the big charity shop chains do the following - the managers are given targets to get volunteers in to reduce the number of paid hours. In some cases, workers show up for a paid shift to be told that enough volunteers have signed up, so they are sent home. Not very charitable sounding, is it?
Our town has a number of empty shops. at least one of which has been empty since pre 2020. The owner cannot be making money out of it, yet is seemingly happy to have it vacant. Surely any income is better than none?
Some shops are owned by property funds that would sooner leave a unit empty than break their rule of upwards only rents, in case it starts a precedent for their other renters.
Easiest way of destroying the value of your property fund - reduce the rent on a property as everyone else in the centre will insist on the same deal come renewal.
And yes I know its exactly what Fairliered is saying but reality is until a shopping centre is virtually empty even a site with 1 or 2 occupied units can look far healthier to the fund than a full centre where the rents are low.
It's why forcing empty sites to be rented via an open auction is the best ways of filling our town centres up with shops, no fund is going to willingly admit their paper valuation for a centre is a work of fiction.
The problem extends back to the banks who lend on the property. Which often have clauses in the lending that blocks reducing rents.
And the banks will run to the government to tell them they risk another banking crisis if they crystallise the loss.
At the moment, they are trying to argue for change of use - redevelopment of high streets into more housing. Which might or might not get them out of the hole they are in.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
Kentucky Fried Chicken?
Nice one.
The history of most nation's cuisines is generally one of invented traditions. Common foods are often much more recent in origin and internationally inspired. For example, pad Thai, the national meal of Thailand, was invented during World War II and based on Chinese recipes. Gyoza are big in Japan, but Chinese in origin and developed after WWII. Modern sushi is about 200 years old, but using salmon in sushi only dates back to the 1980s and was the result of marketing by Norwegian salmon exporters.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.
Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.
'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'
Muslims see Jesus Christ as a prophet and Messiah, they just don't believe in the Trinity and that he is also the son of God
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
Snap. Chicken tikka masala is basically an English dish, for instance.
Invented in Glasgow, AFAIK.
There seem to be multiple claims. I suspect it was just a dish (and indeed a style of dish) that the world was ready for.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
How do we define 'foreign' food there?
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
Snap. Chicken tikka masala is basically an English dish, for instance.
Invented in Glasgow, AFAIK.
I think R4 recently did one of their afternoon plays on it. Prime R4 tucker of course.
Very good quote from my current favourite book (because I've only just finished it), Kill all Normies, by Angela Nagle:
"Liberals don't believe in actual politics any more, just bearing witness to suffering. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics."
I thought it was conservatives who are always whining about how hard done they are.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.
Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.
'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'
Phillips sounds a bit confused, it seems very unlikely that many immigrants, christian or otherwise, were on the TR march.
Very good quote from my current favourite book (because I've only just finished it), Kill all Normies, by Angela Nagle:
"Liberals don't believe in actual politics any more, just bearing witness to suffering. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics."
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Very interesting. There appears to be a contradiction between a crowd of - let's say xenophobic - people being nevertheless motivated by a faith largely driven by immigrants.
Hmmmm. The parent drift away from the faith, keeping it nominally. Then the children, searching for identity and certainty, rediscover The Faith.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
My father moved from South Wales to South Essex in the 30's, and my mother moved from from Hertfordshire to South Essex. I came back to South Essex after student days and brought my wife, a Lancashire girl, with me. Now we live in North/Mid Essex. My sister moved to Scotland on marriage, then, after many years to the Channel Islands. Now she's in a Care Home in SW London near one of her daughters. My eldest son lives in Kent, my younger one in Thailand, both with families.
I was brought up on Canvey Island, where the touchstone of being a 'genuine' Islander was, in my day anyway "Were (or more likely Was) you here in the (1953) Flood?"
My family seems to have moved around a fair amount. I don't think it's a class thing particularly, my grandparents on my mum's side came from a working class, quite poor, background, and spent most of their adult lives working abroad owing to my grandfather's job as a ship's engineer. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've also lived and worked overseas and live 350 miles from where I grew up. I don't look down on people who never leave their home town, each to their own. But I don't think that gives them the right to be hostile to newcomers. I can't abide rudeness.
How are things going with the Starmer-Mandelson scandal? Is the noose tightening?
I think it depends on how much it rumbles on over the next week and then into the Labour conference.
No matter whether this proves fatal or not, the fact that more Labour MPs (if still the usual suspects) are openly going over the top and questioning the leadership means something has changed. Before Mandelson you got the impression that they were all just feeling a sense of quiet despair, now it feels like there’s some anger bubbling up.
'Labour’s benefits rebels have backed Andy Burnham in his challenge to Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the party.
MPs who defeated the Prime Minister’s attempts at welfare reform told The Telegraph it was clear “this administration is coming to an end” and that Labour voters on the doorstep were calling for a new party leader.
The hard bit for Farage will be keeping up the pretence that he is an everyman anti-elite crusader. Difficult to do when you are part of the elite. If not this then something else - and it may well be policy.
If the current trend continues and refuk continue to lead, their policy positions will come under scrutiny.
Policy can win or lose an election, even if people agree with the policies they have to agree with the person saying them. Ask Jeremy Corbyn about this - popular policies until you say whose they are.
Farage has the inverse problem - the popular guy who will Fix People's Problems. But as we get into actual detail and people start to actually think, how much of this will survive as people have it explained to them in black and white how the Nigel's policies are the exact opposite of what they expect? How voting Reform will make their lives worse, not better?
I expect "fake news" to be used a lot to try and explain away awkward facts...
The idea that a member of the “elite” can’t represent the “non-elite” doesn’t pass the test of history.
Where did I say that? I said that he claims not to be the elite.
He is claiming to be "non-elite" in outlook, not personal wealth.
Just as Caesar (nobiles, family going back to the kings, immensely rich) claimed to be an outsider to the existing elite - which he was to an extent. His entire political career was in the face of The Establishment.
See all those who have followed him. All the way to Trump.
It seems difficult for those in conventional politics to realise - The Head Count see *everyone* at the top of politics as rich and powerful.
Angela Rayner is rich and powerful - to them. She earns multiple times their salary in their lifetime, will retire on a pension higher than their salaries, owns lots of property, mixes with the rich and powerful etc.
What the Head Count see is an In Group (Currently the Labour/Conservative/Lib Dem) which, to them seems to consist of identikit politicians, selling the same message. Those aspiring to be the Out Group are accepted as the Populares.
Distinctions that matter to members of the elite are irrelevant to the Head Count.
A senator would consider the Vetii of Pompeii as a part of the Plebs Sordida. To the Head Count, the Vetii would be rich beyond imagination.
Generally, ownership of a single slave was what distinguished the respectable poor from the Head Count. Ancient utopias were described as societies where even the meanest peasant or townsman could afford a slave.
Indeed. Whose mama wouldn't invite someone else's mama to tea seems dreadfully important to the chap whose mum doesn't get cucumber sandwiches.
To those at the bottom - "He got a whole country (province) to steal from."
I've no idea and not much more interest but it is entirely possible that she was making her own way when they met in low paid employment but that her parents are loaded and helped her out buying this property. The 2 versions are not necessarily inconsistent.
My concern is despite all this gotcha nonsense for Farage and Rayner the focus is never on how ridiculous our rules and indeed taxes are on the buying of property. Why on earth should buying a house be a taxable event? How does this help job mobility, younger buyers wanting to have families, investment in the housing stock etc etc? Are we not acting directly against several important public policies? They are stupid taxes and have become ever more so as we try to penalise those with more than one property.
CGT on the vendor? Both taxes try to claw back some of the capital gain in the housing market boosted by successive, mainly Tory, governments.
CGT on the vendor makes a lot more sense than what we do right now but it also discourages downsizing, job mobility etc. Almost all taxes have some negative effects but property taxes seem to me to be much more pernicious than most.
The only tax on real property that makes sense is a land value tax because it encourages efficient use of land. The rest is fiddling.
I agree in principle and like the effect, but it fails the easy-to-implement test. Last sale price + local HPI is the way IMO.
CPI is better than local HPI. Avoids scope for disputes
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
Interesting. Just to qualify one point. In Cumberland (non lake district part) it is completely normal for people of all ages never to have lived anywhere else but their home town/village and immediate locality. I suspect this is true of a number of not much noticed parts of the country.
There is a also a substantial younger group of people for who this is true except for the years 18-21 approx away at HE of some sort.
Another feather in Clarkson's Farm's cap is that it introduced Caleb, and the fact that there are many, many Calebs, to the sneering metropolitan elite. Notwithstanding he is now a celeb with a book deal, speaking tour, and whatnot, at the time he was clear that he had likely not travelled further than Chipping Norton his whole life.
When I lived in Barbados (which is twenty one miles long and fourteen miles across) I was told that there were people living in the interior of the country who had never been to the coast. This may have been hyperbole I suppose, although some of the rural communities in parishes like St George and St John were pretty isolated. The Bajan whites (descendents from indentured servants, often Scots and Irish political prisoners, almost on a par with slaves) were often the most isolated, it seemed. Some people really don't like leaving the place they feel comfortable.
They'd never been to the Lone Star - can't believe it...
I lived in Barbados for three years and never went there either. I preferred the nightlife on the south coast, the Boatyard, Harbour Lights and the bars and restaurants on St Lawrence Gap. The west coast was a bit up itself.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I coukd walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Can you count them on the six fingers of one hand?
You know when I was sat on my teetermatorter with an old mawkin having a mardle he told me six comes after five and I thought that was a rum old job
Thass roight, owd bor! I remember being told a story about a pub in Ipswich called the Arboretum. Apparently, it was built on the site of an orchard. The foreman told a labourer to chop them down. When he asked the foreman what he should do with the apples, he was told, ah, bor, eatum.
If it was an orchard in that Ipswich the trees would have all been on the huh anyway. And the labourer will have been slower than a dodman.
'Labour’s benefits rebels have backed Andy Burnham in his challenge to Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the party.
MPs who defeated the Prime Minister’s attempts at welfare reform told The Telegraph it was clear “this administration is coming to an end” and that Labour voters on the doorstep were calling for a new party leader.
Very good quote from my current favourite book (because I've only just finished it), Kill all Normies, by Angela Nagle:
"Liberals don't believe in actual politics any more, just bearing witness to suffering. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics."
Sounds dreadful.
If you want to understand where we are with today's eg gender wars it is invaluable.
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
Interesting responses which made me look for more evidence. According to this, 8% have never been abroad and 41% have never tried foreign food.
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
Two or three generations ago our equivalents would perhaps have gone to the pub every evening to see the same dozen people - its still the world shown at the Queen Vic, Woolpack and Rovers Return - now we come here and talk to people from around the country.
Yes and I'm certainly not in the camp of those who believe all "change" is inherently bad. It can be unsettling, certainly, but it's often positive in time.
The technological changes outpace the cultural adaptations - we know that. There have also been huge societal changes over the past couple of hundred years, some of which happened very quickly and again adaptation is outpaced by the speed of that change.
When Mrs Stodge came to England from NZ in 1991, her communication with her family back in Kiwiland was either by letter or a short and expensive weekly phone call. 30+ years on, she can FaceTime her mother for free and it's like being in the room with her. In that sense, as you rightly say, technology has improved the quality of life for so many people who aren't in physical proximity - my parents and my maternal grandparents lived in neighbouring streets on the same estate in south east London in the 1960s.
The converse of that it has encouraged or driven what Gove calls "atomisation" (amongst other factors). We can be anywhere, we can be everywhere and we can be nowhere all at the same time.
I'm probably an extreme example - I grew up in cities in 3 different countries, worked in two others, and I've retired to a happy marriage in an Oxfordshire village. I don't feel particularly rooted anywhere, but I'm aware of multiple influences. People who say proudly that they've never lived anywhere but their home town sound increasingly unusual, and I can't see that ever being reversed. An effect of that is that lifelong friendships tend to be occasional encounters without losing all their essential quaity - I have a friend in California who I met last week for the first time in 60 years, and we rapidly tuned into each other.
Nonetheless, the trend increases the importance of electronic interaction, and in a way I know people on this forum better than I know my Calfornian friend. Couple that to the natural tendency to find idelogically and philosophically ttuned online groups, and you can see how the world becomes atomised and people come to think that nearly everyone agrees with their ideas, however odd. I used to know a Danish Supreme Court judge who deliberately read a hostile daily paper to counter that tendency, but few of us have the time or inclination for tht - I never look at the Mail, and shouldn't think that Marquee Mark spends much time studying the Guardian.
That does make forums with varying opinions like this quite important and refreshing. We may not agree with each other, but at least we become more aware that we exist!
I the bit in bold is partly your bubble talking. The 50 % of the population who go to Uni, move about for work etc will be like you, but there will be many, many others who grow up, live, work and retire in the same area. I know loads of them.
The bulk of both sides of my rather extended large family have lived most or all of their lives in Norfolk. Aside from Uni and 2 years in Essex ive been here for well over 50 years. My father lives in a house he bought in 1972, ive family who live in a house handed down in their direct line of the family since the early 20th century. I agree with you, and im in no way unusual as ive childhood friends who are in the same situation.
In fact.... Just working this out.... In an hour from this sofa, on foot, I coukd walk past and end up at every house my grandparents and parents ever lived at from the start of WW2 to today
Can you count them on the six fingers of one hand?
You know when I was sat on my teetermatorter with an old mawkin having a mardle he told me six comes after five and I thought that was a rum old job
Thass roight, owd bor! I remember being told a story about a pub in Ipswich called the Arboretum. Apparently, it was built on the site of an orchard. The foreman told a labourer to chop them down. When he asked the foreman what he should do with the apples, he was told, ah, bor, eatum.
If it was an orchard in that Ipswich the trees would have all been on the huh anyway. And the labourer will have been slower than a dodman.
'Labour’s benefits rebels have backed Andy Burnham in his challenge to Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the party.
MPs who defeated the Prime Minister’s attempts at welfare reform told The Telegraph it was clear “this administration is coming to an end” and that Labour voters on the doorstep were calling for a new party leader.
Picture of the day: I'm always fascinated by abrupt changes of land use. Here is the point where the encroaching flattification of Manchester reaches the bit we might term 'what inner Manchester used to be like'.
The hedge, or the trees just in front of the flats?
Sorry - in retrospect I should ha e cropped this better. In the background is the new inner Manchester (actually Salford) - dense flats - then coming forward you have a scrapyard, then some scrubby overgrown land - then me on the tram from which this was taken - and behind me more new flats. It's the scrapyard I find fascinating. Twenty years ago it would have beenentirely typical, now it is incongruous.
Very similar phenomena in Oxford - in the 1980s it had that sort of scrub-scrapyard-widget works-andf-allotment ecotope all the way down the Thames and canal/railway corridor. Went back a few years ago and the corridor was increasingly jammed almost unrecogniseably full of yuppie flats, business schools, student accommodation (no bad thing as it took some pressure off the housing market), upmarket [edit] industrial estates, etc.
PS And the fine brewery and linked pub by the castle were gone and the castle prison was a ruddy upmarket hotel.
I've no idea and not much more interest but it is entirely possible that she was making her own way when they met in low paid employment but that her parents are loaded and helped her out buying this property. The 2 versions are not necessarily inconsistent.
My concern is despite all this gotcha nonsense for Farage and Rayner the focus is never on how ridiculous our rules and indeed taxes are on the buying of property. Why on earth should buying a house be a taxable event? How does this help job mobility, younger buyers wanting to have families, investment in the housing stock etc etc? Are we not acting directly against several important public policies? They are stupid taxes and have become ever more so as we try to penalise those with more than one property.
CGT on the vendor? Both taxes try to claw back some of the capital gain in the housing market boosted by successive, mainly Tory, governments.
CGT on the vendor makes a lot more sense than what we do right now but it also discourages downsizing, job mobility etc. Almost all taxes have some negative effects but property taxes seem to me to be much more pernicious than most.
The only tax on real property that makes sense is a land value tax because it encourages efficient use of land. The rest is fiddling.
I agree in principle and like the effect, but it fails the easy-to-implement test. Last sale price + local HPI is the way IMO.
CPI is better than local HPI. Avoids scope for disputes
That would fail to capture the massive appreciation of housing assets in the SE versus the NE of England. You'd be charging people in Middlesbrough who've lived in the same house for decades an unfair amount.
I wouldn't allow anyone to dispute the charge. It reflects the overall house price inflation in your area; if you've invested lots of cash in the property since you bought it, you don't get charged tax on those improvements.
I've no idea and not much more interest but it is entirely possible that she was making her own way when they met in low paid employment but that her parents are loaded and helped her out buying this property. The 2 versions are not necessarily inconsistent.
My concern is despite all this gotcha nonsense for Farage and Rayner the focus is never on how ridiculous our rules and indeed taxes are on the buying of property. Why on earth should buying a house be a taxable event? How does this help job mobility, younger buyers wanting to have families, investment in the housing stock etc etc? Are we not acting directly against several important public policies? They are stupid taxes and have become ever more so as we try to penalise those with more than one property.
CGT on the vendor? Both taxes try to claw back some of the capital gain in the housing market boosted by successive, mainly Tory, governments.
CGT on the vendor makes a lot more sense than what we do right now but it also discourages downsizing, job mobility etc. Almost all taxes have some negative effects but property taxes seem to me to be much more pernicious than most.
The only tax on real property that makes sense is a land value tax because it encourages efficient use of land. The rest is fiddling.
I agree in principle and like the effect, but it fails the easy-to-implement test. Last sale price + local HPI is the way IMO.
We bought our house in 1976 for £15,000
It's current market value is circa £500,000 whereas applying inflation only it would be just over £100,000
You apply it to land value, on a district (not individual property) level.
HPI is either house price inflation or house price index, I think (both meaning the same). So you uprate the assessed value of a house based on sale prices of neighbouring properties (which is largely what the online house price estimators do at present - and a fair bit of what local estate agents do*). Doesn't pick up extensions etc so would need to decide how (and whether) to account for that, depending on whether we want to encourage extension building - council tax also doesn't automatically adjust for extensions, to my personal advantage, until revaluation on sale, I believe. It could be done though, through planning applications and/or building control (latter as planning applications not needed for permitted development).
You could do similar on land value - do the same price tracking but take out the RICS rebuild cost or similar.
I support all of these approaches in principle. I am however interested in my particular case, where my land would nowadays support probably three or even four houses. It's a 1920s semi with a long garden - now rather than a row of semis along the road, there would be a cul-de-sac or another parallel road put in. Does that mean my land is high value? On the market it wouldn't be as you couldn't build the extra houses without purchasing neighbouring ones and knocking them down too - there's not enough space on the side for an access road. If you did a simple value per sqm calculation based on local averages then it would be assessed as high value nonetheless.
I wouldn't make any kind of adjustments for improvements to the house - we want to encourage that kind of investment, so a shell you buy In Greenock that you turn into a £500k house would still be charged as if it's worth £50k.
How are things going with the Starmer-Mandelson scandal? Is the noose tightening?
I think it depends on how much it rumbles on over the next week and then into the Labour conference.
No matter whether this proves fatal or not, the fact that more Labour MPs (if still the usual suspects) are openly going over the top and questioning the leadership means something has changed. Before Mandelson you got the impression that they were all just feeling a sense of quiet despair, now it feels like there’s some anger bubbling up.
Thanks. My sense is that Sir Keir is safe for now - the whole thing is getting bogged down in 'what email was sent to what official when, and when did that official contact that official' stuff. Boring. And none of it is particularly incriminating for Sir Keir anyway. Sir Keir's enemies need to start working on another plan.
Very good quote from my current favourite book (because I've only just finished it), Kill all Normies, by Angela Nagle:
"Liberals don't believe in actual politics any more, just bearing witness to suffering. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics."
It's an aspect of modern Chritianity in this country that intrigues me. The one with the highest victim credentials is top dog. I'd really like to understand the theology behind it.
"Starmer will be ousted after May elections, Labour MP predicts Richard Burgon says it is ‘inevitable’ that PM will have to go if party performs as badly in 2026 local elections as polling suggests"
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Would be interested to know (though probably unknowable) how many of the marchers on Saturday attend religious events of any kind. In my own part of the world sectarian marchers tend to identify along religious lines but I hae ma doots about how much genuine religious observance is attached. The Christian nationalism (in the UK at least) seems emptily performative, though I'm willing to be surprused by news that Tommy Robinson cuts up his coke with a communion wafer.
Pro-Christian is an alternative way of saying anti-Muslim.
'I'm no of fan of Christ our saviour and lord, but at least he never said anything positive about Muslims.'
Phillips sounds a bit confused, it seems very unlikely that many immigrants, christian or otherwise, were on the TR march.
It's an attempt by the terminally online to import American style political Christianity, the Charlie Kirk tendency.
For a bunch of "patriots" they seem very keen on us copying America.
Trevor Phillips on Times Radio this morning said the three main themes of the march were 1) immigration; 2) pride in our country; and 3) christianity.
Which last I didn't see coming as England is quite some way along its post-reformation journey to complete atheism. Stig Abell countered that when people said "christianity" it was shorthand for times gone past (old maids..holy communion...etc).
To which he, Phillips, then went on to say that the/a main driving force of this christian resurgence was from immigrants.
Very interesting. There appears to be a contradiction between a crowd of - let's say xenophobic - people being nevertheless motivated by a faith largely driven by immigrants.
Hmmmm. The parent drift away from the faith, keeping it nominally. Then the children, searching for identity and certainty, rediscover The Faith.
No, that's never happened before.
Yes, it seems to me that people who have been told they have no culture are seeking their roots, and the prevalence of Islam emphasises that those roots are Christian.
Any chance of a by election, or don't we do that any more?
UKIP did it because they knew they'd win. It's neither required nor particularly likely I think. I suspect it won't happen.
The Tories held East Wiltshire's constituency wards overall fairly easily in May, Reform won 3 wards - The Tidburys and one other and the LDs won a couple and an indy one, the rest were strongly Tory Id back a Tory hold Unless Danny has a strong personal vote
Very good quote from my current favourite book (because I've only just finished it), Kill all Normies, by Angela Nagle:
"Liberals don't believe in actual politics any more, just bearing witness to suffering. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics."
It's an aspect of modern Chritianity in this country that intrigues me. The one with the highest victim credentials is top dog. I'd really like to understand the theology behind it.
How are things going with the Starmer-Mandelson scandal? Is the noose tightening?
I think it depends on how much it rumbles on over the next week and then into the Labour conference.
No matter whether this proves fatal or not, the fact that more Labour MPs (if still the usual suspects) are openly going over the top and questioning the leadership means something has changed. Before Mandelson you got the impression that they were all just feeling a sense of quiet despair, now it feels like there’s some anger bubbling up.
Thanks. My sense is that Sir Keir is safe for now - the whole thing is getting bogged down in 'what email was sent to what official when, and when did that official contact that official' stuff. Boring. And none of it is particularly incriminating for Sir Keir anyway. Sir Keir's enemies need to start working on another plan.
What is Starmer's problem is that he thought appointing Mandelson was a risk worth taking, and as was seen on the media yesterday when Peter Kyle made the same argument it was very badly received by Epstein's victims' relatives, his own back benchers, and the media generally
'He should not have been appointed in the first place' seems to be the attitude of the public
Comments
Reform exist because the Tories created a (large) gap in the market for a plausible party of right.
Reform are topping the polls because Starmer has been given an enormous majority, and has used it to do a particularly bad version of continuity Sunakism.
With both traditional the mainstream left and right parties mere shells of themselves, it's hardly surprising that Farage is king of all he surveys.
(This thing about his stamp duty seems to me to be a complete nothing-burger. Rayner's position was untenable mainly because it exposed her a sanctimonious hypocrite, who spent her life spouting hyperbolic utterances about tax avoidance, whilst evading tax herself. You can't sling that sort of mud at Farage, because he's never really been into that sort of mud-slinging, and therefore there isn't the hypocrity angle.)
Hanging's toogood for them. But don't expect anyone to take what they say seriously. It is, or seems to be from Scott's prolific posting from the place, a cosy virtue-signalling club for people who agree with each other.*so not your (stereo)typical never left trajectory - and we met far from here; it was my job that brought us back to the area
The pb Tories who did not bark in the night time. Is it just me who noticed that of all our party leaders, it is only Kemi who had a good week?
Keir Starmer – under attack from his own side over his lack of political judgement or even plain common sense when appointing and then backing up to the last moment Lord Mandelson who has now had to resign three times for what was, at least to a first approximation, the same pattern of behaviour, being entranced by men considerably richer than him: Geoffrey Robinson, the Hindujas, Jeffrey Epstein. (On second thoughts, who better to inveigle himself into the inner circle of a billionaire property developer and cryptocurrency grifter?)
Ed Davey – the honourable member for falling in the water is being criticised by his own side for irrelevant stunts.
Nigel Farage – stamp duty obviously but also risks being outflanked by Tommy Robinson who attracted somewhere north of 100,000 largely peaceful protestors to London, along with squillionaire cheque-writer Elon Musk.
Kemi Badenoch – widely praised for an excellent PMQs and now can lay claim to two top Labour scalps.
And where were pb's Conservatives? Arguing about crowd sizes and frantically trawling the interwebs for a culture war about the assassination of a man who this time last week they could not have picked out of a police line-up even if he wore his MAGA hat. Poor old Kemi.
Not remarked upon enough, and a boomerang effect from Puritan radicalism in America.
He's about a mile away...
The old style high street simply isn't viable any more in many places - at the same time as we have an acute housing shortage.
I was brought up on Canvey Island, where the touchstone of being a 'genuine' Islander was, in my day anyway "Were (or more likely Was) you here in the (1953) Flood?"
She willbe raging if the voters didn't though
In truth the problem for Kemi is she won’t get any potential credit until she tries to answer the question about what the Tories are for, and what they offer as an alternative.
https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-British-people-have-never-been-outside-the-UK
More startling (to me at least) is that the proportion who have moved in their lives actually seems to be declining:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=proportion+in+uk+who+have+never+moved&udm=50&fbs=AIIjpHxU7SXXniUZfeShr2fp4giZ1Y6MJ25_tmWITc7uy4KIeqDdErwP5rACeJAty2zADJjYuUnSkczEhozYdaq1wZrEheAY38UjnRKVLYFDREDmzxDQH5cf73Nv5SUwLly1WG01kd0x6xwqRzi4OBnEW65tn62XvLTlOVUiuqU_-c52rQSPbzBVwa4gwPo8bjR3cgzknkm5OeDockKv0WDUfN-v0gyB1Q&ved=2ahUKEwjuov_8uNqPAxWYXEEAHZRtBCkQ0NsOegQIJxAA&aep=10&ntc=1&mstk=AUtExfAgBu8TSUCBA5AbdV9puUIn33i5GC3Iw97kdlmw1YWbQLeJSm9KI6RMgPs2MgXr61ae5boVs5ItsO99FhBdwcSZmpDgbJLM5h5ClODIh2DeyhujPEz5Xzdm0ds5KSywGOnQdykqpy12BO8hlQjaGUxXt60EhgkRk9Y&csuir=1
As you say, it's a bubble thing - living in one place and going abroad occasionally for the weather but not eating foreign food seems common, and not apparently in decline.
We can't be far from discovering that two posters share an aunt in Grimsby and inadvertently doxing ourselves
As leaders, we must stand together and make clear Musk will face serious consequences for these actions.
https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/1967294733643829750
Curry, pasta, pizza, noodles were all 'foreign food' to my parents - and I had none of them (apart from Macaroni cheese) in my first ten years of life or so. But I doubt they'd qualify as foreign for most people nowadays.
I'd be interested as to how they define 'foreign food' as the UK probably has the most diverse food culture on the planet. Does pizza count? Curry, Thai, Bengali, sushi?
Of course, taking advice in advance would be better.
The bouldering gym had coffee, powerpoints, desk space and free wifi.
"Do you think the government should increase taxes on the wealthiest to strengthen the country's social and safety net programs?"
Yes: 73%
No: 26%
Beacon/Shaw / Sep 9, 2025
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1967279738105532849
I remember being told a story about a pub in Ipswich called the Arboretum. Apparently, it was built on the site of an orchard. The foreman told a labourer to chop them down. When he asked the foreman what he should do with the apples, he was told, ah, bor, eatum.
A senator would consider the Vetii of Pompeii as a part of the Plebs Sordida. To the Head Count, the Vetii would be rich beyond imagination.
Generally, ownership of a single slave was what distinguished the respectable poor from the Head Count. Ancient utopias were described as societies where even the meanest peasant or townsman could afford a slave.
Converting retail into residential needs good design and provision of local services, though.
Otherwise you risk creating the town centre equivalent of sink estates.
"...Also, as a reminder, I once named a whole fucking book of mine "Virtue Signaling and Other Heresies" so when people accuse me of it, I can say "Yes, and it's available for $4.99 at your favorite online bookstore."..."
"Liberals don't believe in actual politics any more, just bearing witness to suffering. The cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics."
Oh - not that scandal! Whatever happened to the Lord Ali rumours?
And the banks will run to the government to tell them they risk another banking crisis if they crystallise the loss.
At the moment, they are trying to argue for change of use - redevelopment of high streets into more housing. Which might or might not get them out of the hole they are in.
The history of most nation's cuisines is generally one of invented traditions. Common foods are often much more recent in origin and internationally inspired. For example, pad Thai, the national meal of Thailand, was invented during World War II and based on Chinese recipes. Gyoza are big in Japan, but Chinese in origin and developed after WWII. Modern sushi is about 200 years old, but using salmon in sushi only dates back to the 1980s and was the result of marketing by Norwegian salmon exporters.
No, that's never happened before.
I don't look down on people who never leave their home town, each to their own. But I don't think that gives them the right to be hostile to newcomers. I can't abide rudeness.
No matter whether this proves fatal or not, the fact that more Labour MPs (if still the usual suspects) are openly going over the top and questioning the leadership means something has changed. Before Mandelson you got the impression that they were all just feeling a sense of quiet despair, now it feels like there’s some anger bubbling up.
MPs who defeated the Prime Minister’s attempts at welfare reform told The Telegraph it was clear “this administration is coming to an end” and that Labour voters on the doorstep were calling for a new party leader.
They are among MPs who have backed Mr Burnham after his allies set up Mainstream, a new soft-Left campaign group, and are calling on Downing Street to end the two-child benefit rule, introduce wealth taxes and nationalise utility companies.'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/14/starmer-allies-attempt-to-fight-off-burnham-threat-labour/
To those at the bottom - "He got a whole country (province) to steal from."
No doubt he is a massive loss to Kemi.
PS And the fine brewery and linked pub by the castle were gone and the castle prison was a ruddy upmarket hotel.
I'm glad I voted for the Lib Dem
I wouldn't allow anyone to dispute the charge. It reflects the overall house price inflation in your area; if you've invested lots of cash in the property since you bought it, you don't get charged tax on those improvements.
Richard Burgon says it is ‘inevitable’ that PM will have to go if party performs as badly in 2026 local elections as polling suggests"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/15/starmer-ousted-after-may-election-disaster-labour-mp-says/
For a bunch of "patriots" they seem very keen on us copying America.
Id back a Tory hold Unless Danny has a strong personal vote
'He should not have been appointed in the first place' seems to be the attitude of the public