Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
People seem to think an AI is just a blank void that gets filled up with training, but that's not true. A lot of the behaviour is hard-coded in to the model when it is created. Most of that would need to be manually recreated to suit British roads, and the training data itself would also be mostly worthless given the obvious differences between US and UK roads.
Can US style full self-driving be replicated in the UK? Yes, but it's almost a case of starting from scratch. The main thing that would transfer over is institutional memory among the developers of difficult corner cases they had to deal with in the US, some of which would apply on this side of the Atlantic.
The UK and Ireland is not a big enough market to warrant this level of investment right away, so we're likely to get self-driving a fair bit later than the US, China and mainland Europe. I do not expect to be walking out of my home in rural Scotland and getting into a fully self-driving car any time before about 2040.
And, of course, most people don't live in rural Scotland.
You can't train self-drivng AI on Street View any more than you could do it on paper maps. Just showing it a road layout (and in the case of Street View an often inaccurate one) is little use. It's much like training a human driver, you can't do it to any degree with maps, we get them out on the road to experience real situations.
It needs human monitored cars to be sent out to find where and when the AI can't deal with situations and teach the model to account for that. It needs data from humans driving normal cars (Tesla thought that would be enough on its own - it isn't).
It's a colossal amount of work, much of which gets thrown away when you transplant the AI to a new market. The main way companies in this space minimise the work is to restrict their cars to a small geographical area, which is why we get endless 'trials' of self-driving cars in small areas of cities where training the AI on all the quirks of the road layout is easier.
I mentioned my rural location because it highlights one of the issues facing self-driving - in terms of road layouts and traffic rural areas are much easier for an AI. If I want to go to the train station I use it's a 20 minute journey with two left turns and one right turn, on roads that are mostly empty. But an AI will get little or no training benefit from a journey that simple, so for that reason these areas will be ignored until the AIs are completely trained and the self-drive car network is big enough for rural journeys to at least not lose too much money.
Is there some significant psychological barrier crossed when the Tories come fifth? Surely fourth would be bad enough
Anyway I love these polls. A plague on both their houses
Yes, right now some Tories have been able to argue that being third in the polls is due to Starmer being rubbish and boosting Reform, but ending up consistently fourth/fifth behind the Greens/Lib Dems will be a barrier crossed.
I agree, I was just querying that distinction twixt 4th and 5th
This feels like a death spiral now, for the Tories. As you say there’s a tipping point when they look terminally irrelevant and any vote for them is wasted. They are horribly close to that point, and it’s not obvious how they reverse the slide. Dumping poor Kemi is necessary - but not sufficient
Labour have different problems. Unlikely to go extinct but facing a defeat so bad they are out of power for 15 years
Perhaps.
I am writing a piece which should go up later on this week which points out based on the MRPs/polls Reform are on course to win the election with a lower vote share/votes than Labour in 2024 (The YouGov MRP had them on 27%) and we saw how unpopular Labour became.
I reckon within a year of the next election Reform could be in the single digits and we end up with a very left wing party leading the polls such as the Greens.
That’s the consensus prediction at Knapper’s Gazette, interestingly
Reform win, fuck it all up, and the NEXT government is far left
It is quite possible, especially as by then we may need UBI
We are in a hi-tech rehash of the 1930s
Taxi driving is about to go the way of the dodo. Waymo has proved it works and Tesla are about to revolutionise building of autonomous vehicles with their new process. I don't know how many people work in car transportation but we should expect it to drop by over 90% in the next decade and for delivery driver pay to crash due to oversupply of qualified drivers.
Maybe but much of Britain is not like the wide, open highways of China and the United States where these self-driving cars are developed. Our roads are narrow, congested and often have cyclists and pedestrians complicating matters. (Come to think of it, was it @Gallowgate who recently posted about how busy the M25 is even at 4am? One of pb's northerners anyway.)
One of the challenges must surely be managing country lane etiquette. You come round the corner and there’s a vehicle driving in your direction. It’s a single track road. One of you must decide to reverse a few metres up into the brambly hedge to allow the other to pass. The parking sensors are beeping continuously. What does a Waymo do in that situation?
The car doesn’t mind reversing, remember. Unlike humans.
When all cars are driverless, they will be able to coordinate to avoid such situations.
But what are they going to navigate by? Google Maps is surely the gold standard, yet in just the last couple of years it led me into a farmer's field during a long journey across Austria, tried to get me to go down some steps in Italy, around a boating lake in Germany, offered me a shortcut along a cycle path in Finland, across a central reservation and along a bus-only route in Norway, and is never able to cope with the time-changing restrictions on driving into most Italian medieval town centres.
Is there some significant psychological barrier crossed when the Tories come fifth? Surely fourth would be bad enough
Anyway I love these polls. A plague on both their houses
Yes, right now some Tories have been able to argue that being third in the polls is due to Starmer being rubbish and boosting Reform, but ending up consistently fourth/fifth behind the Greens/Lib Dems will be a barrier crossed.
And people don't like to be seen backing a loser.
Yup, we'll end up with a donors' strike, that'll end Kemi's leadership.
I am almost regretting vote for her.
A fie on the parliamentary Tory Party for giving me a choice between Badenoch and Jenrick.
Just disband the party. It’s over. Nothing is forever. Soft dads like you can join the LDs - and improve their offering - and harder types can join Reform, giving them gravitas
Win win
The next election should ideally be LDs versus Reform. That would be a good clear choice for the people. The two big parties need to go extinct now
I could never join a party that supports the WASPI women.
The fact that Wera Hobhouse hasn't been expelled for pushing 5G conspiracy theories is another black mark.
Yeh but. No party is spotless. That's just an excuse.
You're like Rory, struggling to overcome a deep suspicion of the LDs, not recognising that you're fighting an attraction. You need to come out as an LD. You'll be welcomed, as will Rory.
This argument is false. Just because I wouldn't vote for one set of loons doesn't mean I shold vote for another set because they are slightly less loony - or actually just as loony but in a different way.
I will continue to do what I have done at almost every GE. I will study and if possible talk to the candidates standing in my constituency, expecially the independents and will then either vote for an independent or will spoil my ballot. I will not vote for any candidate backed by any of the four (in my area) main parties as that affiliation on their part shows a serious and irredeemable lack of intelligence.
Fine, do that if you want - it’s a democracy and it’s your vote so it’s your right - but it’s a cop out. We know if we ever got 632 Independents elected, there would be anarchy or they would inevitably coalesce into like-minded groupings - let’s call them parties, perhaps?
Whether you like it or not, the truth is you can get away with Independently minded types on a parish or small District council but the United Kingdom is a massively complex, multi-layered nuanced geographical and historical construct of nearly 70 million people. Governing it is far from simple or straightforward and I’d argue the complexity of the modern world has further increased that difficulty to the extent one ideology, however coherent, won’t do the job any longer.
My personal view is post-industrial post-work western societies are almost ungovernable and certainly not by groupings whose ideological roots are in the 19th and 20th centuries if not earlier. New ideologies and doctrines will emerge but they will be unrecognisable from what has been the case hitherto.
A lot of words to justify nothing and everything, most of it nothing to do with what I said. There is no cop out in deciding that all of the main parties are as bad as each other in one way or another. A plague on all your houses is the only sane attitude to take when faced with such an idiocracy.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
I am not convinced the Tories realise that Reform are their enemies.
"Never kissed a Reformer" should be Kemi's red cap of choice.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
This is not a prediction.
Where is there any evidence that Starmer believes he can't do the job and will admit to it?
With current PMs it is in the nature of the job that there isn't direct evidence until there is, at which point he is no longer PM.
Sunak I think packed it in without admitting that really the job wasn't for him but I think he realised it wasn't. But the rest weren't going anywhere without being shoved and even to this day are arguing I was well go at the job or the deep state stopped me being well good.
He did the most cowardly thing of all - he plunged the Tory Party into an unnecessary General Election and the country into the disaster of the Starmer Government, precisely because he couldn't admit it wasn't for him.
Hardly cowardly. He went in July with an election needed by December at the latest and the public resolved to kick the Tories out regardless.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
This is not a prediction.
Where is there any evidence that Starmer believes he can't do the job and will admit to it?
With current PMs it is in the nature of the job that there isn't direct evidence until there is, at which point he is no longer PM.
Sunak I think packed it in without admitting that really the job wasn't for him but I think he realised it wasn't. But the rest weren't going anywhere without being shoved and even to this day are arguing I was well go at the job or the deep state stopped me being well good.
He did the most cowardly thing of all - he plunged the Tory Party into an unnecessary General Election and the country into the disaster of the Starmer Government, precisely because he couldn't admit it wasn't for him.
Hardly cowardly. He went in July with an election needed by December at the latest and the public resolved to kick the Tories out regardless.
Lucky has some sauce beating up on Big Rish, or Starmer for that matter, when he spent 49 days eulogising Truss and her "most Conservative budget since 1986".
Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
People seem to think an AI is just a blank void that gets filled up with training, but that's not true. A lot of the behaviour is hard-coded in to the model when it is created. Most of that would need to be manually recreated to suit British roads, and the training data itself would also be mostly worthless given the obvious differences between US and UK roads.
Can US style full self-driving be replicated in the UK? Yes, but it's almost a case of starting from scratch. The main thing that would transfer over is institutional memory among the developers of difficult corner cases they had to deal with in the US, some of which would apply on this side of the Atlantic.
The UK and Ireland is not a big enough market to warrant this level of investment right away, so we're likely to get self-driving a fair bit later than the US, China and mainland Europe. I do not expect to be walking out of my home in rural Scotland and getting into a fully self-driving car any time before about 2040.
And, of course, most people don't live in rural Scotland.
You can't train self-drivng AI on Street View any more than you could do it on paper maps. Just showing it a road layout (and in the case of Street View an often inaccurate one) is little use. It's much like training a human driver, you can't do it to any degree with maps, we get them out on the road to experience real situations.
It needs human monitored cars to be sent out to find where and when the AI can't deal with situations and teach the model to account for that. It needs data from humans driving normal cars (Tesla thought that would be enough on its own - it isn't).
It's a colossal amount of work, much of which gets thrown away when you transplant the AI to a new market. The main way companies in this space minimise the work is to restrict their cars to a small geographical area, which is why we get endless 'trials' of self-driving cars in small areas of cities where training the AI on all the quirks of the road layout is easier.
I mentioned my rural location because it highlights one of the issues facing self-driving - in terms of road layouts and traffic rural areas are much easier for an AI. If I want to go to the train station I use it's a 20 minute journey with two left turns and one right turn, on roads that are mostly empty. But an AI will get little or no training benefit from a journey that simple, so for that reason these areas will be ignored until the AIs are completely trained and the self-drive car network is big enough for rural journeys to at least not lose too much money.
The independence of the Electoral Commission must be fully restored to protect the UK’s electoral integrity from a future authoritarian government, a new report warns.
The Democracy in Danger report by the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption found the UK government was in breach of eight different international standards on ensuring the independence of electoral bodies by maintaining the government’s oversight of the watchdog.
It warned current ministerial power over the Electoral Commission, brought in by Boris Johnson, “could easily be abused to undermine our democracy”.
Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
People seem to think an AI is just a blank void that gets filled up with training, but that's not true. A lot of the behaviour is hard-coded in to the model when it is created. Most of that would need to be manually recreated to suit British roads, and the training data itself would also be mostly worthless given the obvious differences between US and UK roads.
Can US style full self-driving be replicated in the UK? Yes, but it's almost a case of starting from scratch. The main thing that would transfer over is institutional memory among the developers of difficult corner cases they had to deal with in the US, some of which would apply on this side of the Atlantic.
The UK and Ireland is not a big enough market to warrant this level of investment right away, so we're likely to get self-driving a fair bit later than the US, China and mainland Europe. I do not expect to be walking out of my home in rural Scotland and getting into a fully self-driving car any time before about 2040.
And, of course, most people don't live in rural Scotland.
You can't train self-drivng AI on Street View any more than you could do it on paper maps. Just showing it a road layout (and in the case of Street View an often inaccurate one) is little use. It's much like training a human driver, you can't do it to any degree with maps, we get them out on the road to experience real situations.
It needs human monitored cars to be sent out to find where and when the AI can't deal with situations and teach the model to account for that. It needs data from humans driving normal cars (Tesla thought that would be enough on its own - it isn't).
It's a colossal amount of work, much of which gets thrown away when you transplant the AI to a new market. The main way companies in this space minimise the work is to restrict their cars to a small geographical area, which is why we get endless 'trials' of self-driving cars in small areas of cities where training the AI on all the quirks of the road layout is easier.
I mentioned my rural location because it highlights one of the issues facing self-driving - in terms of road layouts and traffic rural areas are much easier for an AI. If I want to go to the train station I use it's a 20 minute journey with two left turns and one right turn, on roads that are mostly empty. But an AI will get little or no training benefit from a journey that simple, so for that reason these areas will be ignored until the AIs are completely trained and the self-drive car network is big enough for rural journeys to at least not lose too much money.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
This is not a prediction.
Where is there any evidence that Starmer believes he can't do the job and will admit to it?
With current PMs it is in the nature of the job that there isn't direct evidence until there is, at which point he is no longer PM.
Sunak I think packed it in without admitting that really the job wasn't for him but I think he realised it wasn't. But the rest weren't going anywhere without being shoved and even to this day are arguing I was well go at the job or the deep state stopped me being well good.
I think Sunak - and May before him - could have been a reasonable PM in reasonable times. But the times were not reasonable: the party had been in power for a decade and was out of ideas; the party was riven; we were coming out of a massive crisis (Covid) that they had had to manage, and the economy was in a poor state. He also had only a couple of years to turn the boat around before a GE.
I don't think any UK politician, of any party, could have navigated that situation and won the GE.
Starmer has a much better inheritance. He has a massive majority; he has loads of fresh MPs in the party (both a positive and a negative...), and whilst the economy is still poorish, the party *should* be easy to manage given the massive win he's given them. And he had four or five years to get the job started before the next GE.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
This is not a prediction.
Where is there any evidence that Starmer believes he can't do the job and will admit to it?
With current PMs it is in the nature of the job that there isn't direct evidence until there is, at which point he is no longer PM.
Sunak I think packed it in without admitting that really the job wasn't for him but I think he realised it wasn't. But the rest weren't going anywhere without being shoved and even to this day are arguing I was well go at the job or the deep state stopped me being well good.
I think Sunak - and May before him - could have been a reasonable PM in reasonable times. But the times were not reasonable: the party had been in power for a decade and was out of ideas; the party was riven; we were coming out of a massive crisis (Covid) that they had had to manage, and the economy was in a poor state. He also had only a couple of years to turn the boat around before a GE.
I don't think any UK politician, of any party, could have navigated that situation and won the GE.
Starmer has a much better inheritance. He has a massive majority; he has loads of fresh MPs in the party (both a positive and a negative...), and whilst the economy is still poorish, the party *should* be easy to manage given the massive win he's given them. And he had four or five years to get the job started before the next GE.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
The independence of the Electoral Commission must be fully restored to protect the UK’s electoral integrity from a future authoritarian government, a new report warns.
The Democracy in Danger report by the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption found the UK government was in breach of eight different international standards on ensuring the independence of electoral bodies by maintaining the government’s oversight of the watchdog.
It warned current ministerial power over the Electoral Commission, brought in by Boris Johnson, “could easily be abused to undermine our democracy”.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
This is not a prediction.
Where is there any evidence that Starmer believes he can't do the job and will admit to it?
With current PMs it is in the nature of the job that there isn't direct evidence until there is, at which point he is no longer PM.
Sunak I think packed it in without admitting that really the job wasn't for him but I think he realised it wasn't. But the rest weren't going anywhere without being shoved and even to this day are arguing I was well go at the job or the deep state stopped me being well good.
I think Sunak - and May before him - could have been a reasonable PM in reasonable times. But the times were not reasonable: the party had been in power for a decade and was out of ideas; the party was riven; we were coming out of a massive crisis (Covid) that they had had to manage, and the economy was in a poor state. He also had only a couple of years to turn the boat around before a GE.
I don't think any UK politician, of any party, could have navigated that situation and won the GE.
Starmer has a much better inheritance. He has a massive majority; he has loads of fresh MPs in the party (both a positive and a negative...), and whilst the economy is still poorish, the party *should* be easy to manage given the massive win he's given them. And he had four or five years to get the job started before the next GE.
Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
People seem to think an AI is just a blank void that gets filled up with training, but that's not true. A lot of the behaviour is hard-coded in to the model when it is created. Most of that would need to be manually recreated to suit British roads, and the training data itself would also be mostly worthless given the obvious differences between US and UK roads.
Can US style full self-driving be replicated in the UK? Yes, but it's almost a case of starting from scratch. The main thing that would transfer over is institutional memory among the developers of difficult corner cases they had to deal with in the US, some of which would apply on this side of the Atlantic.
The UK and Ireland is not a big enough market to warrant this level of investment right away, so we're likely to get self-driving a fair bit later than the US, China and mainland Europe. I do not expect to be walking out of my home in rural Scotland and getting into a fully self-driving car any time before about 2040.
And, of course, most people don't live in rural Scotland.
You can't train self-drivng AI on Street View any more than you could do it on paper maps. Just showing it a road layout (and in the case of Street View an often inaccurate one) is little use. It's much like training a human driver, you can't do it to any degree with maps, we get them out on the road to experience real situations.
It needs human monitored cars to be sent out to find where and when the AI can't deal with situations and teach the model to account for that. It needs data from humans driving normal cars (Tesla thought that would be enough on its own - it isn't).
It's a colossal amount of work, much of which gets thrown away when you transplant the AI to a new market. The main way companies in this space minimise the work is to restrict their cars to a small geographical area, which is why we get endless 'trials' of self-driving cars in small areas of cities where training the AI on all the quirks of the road layout is easier.
I mentioned my rural location because it highlights one of the issues facing self-driving - in terms of road layouts and traffic rural areas are much easier for an AI. If I want to go to the train station I use it's a 20 minute journey with two left turns and one right turn, on roads that are mostly empty. But an AI will get little or no training benefit from a journey that simple, so for that reason these areas will be ignored until the AIs are completely trained and the self-drive car network is big enough for rural journeys to at least not lose too much money.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
There's just not enough money in journalism these days for the quality that used to be produced at, e.g. The Economist. We've gained many things from the internet revolution, but we've lost that.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
The Economist has always been written by precocious 22 year olds with no life experience who have been given the editorial goal of making their readers feel smart. (Bagehot might be the exception to this age rule IIRC.)
Growing up is realising this & treating the opinions of Economist writers accordingly: they can be insightful but too often they are shallow & lacking in rigour. Ultimately it’s just more journalism & thus unable to escape the inevitable flaws that endeavour brings.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Once you realise that that magazine is actually written by a bunch of twenty-something arts graduates with a very tight style guide, it all makes more sense.
These days there’s probably a fair bit of AI involved too.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
It's full of maggots. And the cheese was rank too...
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
It's full of maggots. And the cheese was rank too...
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
It's full of maggots. And the cheese was rank too...
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
It's full of maggots. And the cheese was rank too...
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Opponents is different to enemies
(Hence the old joke about the House of Commons)
oh gosh.
That's a horrible thing to say.
It should have been, 'Opponents are different from enemies.'
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
The article reads like the author was the food correspondent sent on a punishment exercise. Do the readers actually want to try these foods or are just happy that someone else has taken one for the team?
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
Good choice. Right now the Spectator has a brilliant article about eating weird cheese in Sardinia
The article reads like the author was the food correspondent sent on a punishment exercise. Do the readers actually want to try these foods or are just happy that someone else has taken one for the team?
I think we should be very grateful to the author. Since he (or she) has done whatever it is, and written about it none of the rest of us have to do this. Ever!
Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
People seem to think an AI is just a blank void that gets filled up with training, but that's not true. A lot of the behaviour is hard-coded in to the model when it is created. Most of that would need to be manually recreated to suit British roads, and the training data itself would also be mostly worthless given the obvious differences between US and UK roads.
Can US style full self-driving be replicated in the UK? Yes, but it's almost a case of starting from scratch. The main thing that would transfer over is institutional memory among the developers of difficult corner cases they had to deal with in the US, some of which would apply on this side of the Atlantic.
The UK and Ireland is not a big enough market to warrant this level of investment right away, so we're likely to get self-driving a fair bit later than the US, China and mainland Europe. I do not expect to be walking out of my home in rural Scotland and getting into a fully self-driving car any time before about 2040.
And, of course, most people don't live in rural Scotland.
You can't train self-drivng AI on Street View any more than you could do it on paper maps. Just showing it a road layout (and in the case of Street View an often inaccurate one) is little use. It's much like training a human driver, you can't do it to any degree with maps, we get them out on the road to experience real situations.
It needs human monitored cars to be sent out to find where and when the AI can't deal with situations and teach the model to account for that. It needs data from humans driving normal cars (Tesla thought that would be enough on its own - it isn't).
It's a colossal amount of work, much of which gets thrown away when you transplant the AI to a new market. The main way companies in this space minimise the work is to restrict their cars to a small geographical area, which is why we get endless 'trials' of self-driving cars in small areas of cities where training the AI on all the quirks of the road layout is easier.
I mentioned my rural location because it highlights one of the issues facing self-driving - in terms of road layouts and traffic rural areas are much easier for an AI. If I want to go to the train station I use it's a 20 minute journey with two left turns and one right turn, on roads that are mostly empty. But an AI will get little or no training benefit from a journey that simple, so for that reason these areas will be ignored until the AIs are completely trained and the self-drive car network is big enough for rural journeys to at least not lose too much money.
Railway station.
Station.
Too ambiguous.
"Berlin Station" is not a TV series about the Hauptbahnhof.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Opponents is different to enemies
(Hence the old joke about the House of Commons)
oh gosh.
That's a horrible thing to say.
It should have been, 'Opponents are different from enemies.'
Actually it should have been “opponents” is different to “enemies”. I was using the terms as collective nouns
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
So what would you have Starmer do?
Lay out his programme for government and how he intends balancing the books
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
So what would you have Starmer do?
Lay out his programme for government and how he intends balancing the books
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
Yes. If people feel better off, if streets are clean and safe, if the NHS is there when we need it, if schools deliver the education children deserve, if the trains are reliable and the fares aren't a rip-off, then people will have a reason to vote Labour in 2029.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Have been following this guy's ET case to see what the outcome of his fight for free speech achieves. Think he's OOT on the application but am missing the detail. As well his fight for free speech, he draws the reader's attention to the problem of ... cyclists.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
So what would you have Starmer do?
Lay out his programme for government and how he intends balancing the books
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
That's a good answer but it assumes the opponent - in this case Farage - does not react. Farage will. And in the meantime, you are abandoning issues that matter to people to Farage.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Let’s repeat this once again - to work for many firms like Tesco you need a passport to prove you can work in the UK. No passport to hand and they move to the next candidate
Have been following this guy's ET case to see what the outcome of his fight for free speech achieves. Think he's OOT on the application but am missing the detail. As well his fight for free speech, he draws the reader's attention to the problem of ... cyclists.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
So what would you have Starmer do?
Lay out his programme for government and how he intends balancing the books
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
That's a good answer but it assumes the opponent - in this case Farage - does not react. Farage will. And in the meantime, you are abandoning issues that matter to people to Farage.
The problem as I see it is the PM of our Country is labelling 30-34% of voters as a enemies off the country
It should be remembered Starmer's landslide was won on 33.7%
Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
People seem to think an AI is just a blank void that gets filled up with training, but that's not true. A lot of the behaviour is hard-coded in to the model when it is created. Most of that would need to be manually recreated to suit British roads, and the training data itself would also be mostly worthless given the obvious differences between US and UK roads.
Can US style full self-driving be replicated in the UK? Yes, but it's almost a case of starting from scratch. The main thing that would transfer over is institutional memory among the developers of difficult corner cases they had to deal with in the US, some of which would apply on this side of the Atlantic.
The UK and Ireland is not a big enough market to warrant this level of investment right away, so we're likely to get self-driving a fair bit later than the US, China and mainland Europe. I do not expect to be walking out of my home in rural Scotland and getting into a fully self-driving car any time before about 2040.
And, of course, most people don't live in rural Scotland.
You can't train self-drivng AI on Street View any more than you could do it on paper maps. Just showing it a road layout (and in the case of Street View an often inaccurate one) is little use. It's much like training a human driver, you can't do it to any degree with maps, we get them out on the road to experience real situations.
It needs human monitored cars to be sent out to find where and when the AI can't deal with situations and teach the model to account for that. It needs data from humans driving normal cars (Tesla thought that would be enough on its own - it isn't).
It's a colossal amount of work, much of which gets thrown away when you transplant the AI to a new market. The main way companies in this space minimise the work is to restrict their cars to a small geographical area, which is why we get endless 'trials' of self-driving cars in small areas of cities where training the AI on all the quirks of the road layout is easier.
I mentioned my rural location because it highlights one of the issues facing self-driving - in terms of road layouts and traffic rural areas are much easier for an AI. If I want to go to the train station I use it's a 20 minute journey with two left turns and one right turn, on roads that are mostly empty. But an AI will get little or no training benefit from a journey that simple, so for that reason these areas will be ignored until the AIs are completely trained and the self-drive car network is big enough for rural journeys to at least not lose too much money.
Railway station.
Station.
Too ambiguous.
"Berlin Station" is not a TV series about the Hauptbahnhof.
Station is a character in one of the Bill & Ted movies.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Let’s repeat this once again - to work for many firms like Tesco you need a passport to prove you can work in the UK. No passport to hand and they move to the next candidate
That's the issue isn't it; big firms like Tesco obey the law; medium and most small firms do as well. But there are quite a few one (or two) person firms which play cash in hand to short-term, or sometimes even reasonably long term, workers and neither side asks too many questions. We need an enforcement unit doing some checking.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Let’s repeat this once again - to work for many firms like Tesco you need a passport to prove you can work in the UK. No passport to hand and they move to the next candidate
That's the issue isn't it; big firms like Tesco obey the law; medium and most small firms do as well. But there are quite a few one (or two) person firms which play cash in hand to short-term, or sometimes even reasonably long term, workers and neither side asks too many questions. We need an enforcement unit doing some checking.
A good point came up in the discussions on the media this morning that those employing illegals already ignore the law and will continue to do so irrespective of ID cards
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Let’s repeat this once again - to work for many firms like Tesco you need a passport to prove you can work in the UK. No passport to hand and they move to the next candidate
That's the issue isn't it; big firms like Tesco obey the law; medium and most small firms do as well. But there are quite a few one (or two) person firms which play cash in hand to short-term, or sometimes even reasonably long term, workers and neither side asks too many questions. We need an enforcement unit doing some checking.
That’s the exact opposite of my point - the large firms go for an easy live with centralized (so online) checks so if you don’t have a passport they skip British candidates because it’s easier to recruit the person with electronic paperwork - simpy because they don’t trust local workers to do things correctly
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
No! Starmer needs to attack Farage. He needs to call him out on the tacit pro-Trump anti Vax and quack doctor RFK Jnr health agenda, he needs to call out Reform for the casual and direct racism and Islamophobia. Starmer needs to call Farage's view on Putin and Ukraine. Where they stand on Netanyahu genocide. He needs to call out their funding model for the NHS. He needs to call out their tax cut and service provision agenda.
One of the reasons Reform are so far ahead is they have been given a free ride by politicians and the media.
Your party is delusional and still under the misapprehension that Reform would be a handy junior partner in a ConRef coalition should the Tories fall short of a majority next time. As it stands they will be Farage's little helpers. The Tories should be telling their voters what a Farage Government means to the UK. They are not your friends!
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
No! Starmer needs to attack Farage. He needs to call him out on the tacit pro-Trump anti Vax and quack doctor RFK Jnr health agenda, he needs to call out Reform for the casual and direct racism and Islamophobia. Starmer needs to call Farage's view on Putin and Ukraine. Where they stand on Netanyahu genocide. He needs to call out their funding model for the NHS. He needs to call out their tax cut and service provision agenda.
One of the reasons Reform are so far ahead is they have been given a free ride by politicians and the media.
Your party is delusional and still under the misapprehension that Reform would be a handy junior partner in a ConRef coalition should the Tories fall short of a majority next time. As it stands they will be Farage's little helpers. The Tories should be telling their voters what a Farage Government means to the UK. They are not your friends!
When have I ever said Farage and Reform are my friends ?
I expect Badenoch to layout clear blue water at the conference next week
And I simply do not accept Reform have been given a free ride by the media
I expected a poll drop after their distasteful deportation policy announcements, but Mandelson overtook the news media with more labour sleeze
Of course Starmer should reject Farage and Reform but he is making a mistake calling them and their voters the enemy
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Let’s introduce an ID system, with its implementation and management subcontracted to Estonia, with the UK Civil Service and the government’s favoured agencies excluded from its operation, and see whether the government are still in favour of it.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Actually it seems a large number of people from our local council estates post lots of foreign holiday photos on social media
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Let’s repeat this once again - to work for many firms like Tesco you need a passport to prove you can work in the UK. No passport to hand and they move to the next candidate
That's the issue isn't it; big firms like Tesco obey the law; medium and most small firms do as well. But there are quite a few one (or two) person firms which play cash in hand to short-term, or sometimes even reasonably long term, workers and neither side asks too many questions. We need an enforcement unit doing some checking.
That’s the exact opposite of my point - the large firms go for an easy live with centralized (so online) checks so if you don’t have a passport they skip British candidates because it’s easier to recruit the person with electronic paperwork - simpy because they don’t trust local workers to do things correctly
Not the exact opposite but derived from your post. I recall the time, many years ago, when I was running a small group of pharmacies. I employed a pharmacist ..... yes he'd got the relevant certificate ...... as a branch manager, pointing out in doing so that he'd have to deliver the occasional oxygen cylinder, something pharmacies did back in the 70's. Had he got a car? Yes, and he'd be driving to work in it. So no problem. A couple of months later it turned out that while he had a car he didn't have a driving licence. Perhaps naively, I'd assumed that a professional colleague wouldn't drive without a licence. Anyway hard words were said and shortly afterwards he left.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Which takes us back to how warped and unhinged the national conversation is.
The way to think about this plan is using technology to make life easier for citizens. Whenever you move house, change jobs, do significant financial transactions or vote in person, you have to prove your identity. At the monent, that involves various degrees of clunkiness- it's not too bad if you have a passport and/or driving licence, but plenty of people don't. (And even then, the paper bank statement/utility bills thing is getting tricky.) Having a thing that you can show that proves who you are and not much else is the sort of incremental improvement that makes everyone's lives a bit better and makes the national administration a bit smoother that governments ought to be doing.
We can't talk about it that way, because all the media want to ask about is the alleged migration crisis. This will probably help a bit there (at the moment, ID checks are more faff than they are worth for microbusinesses, and more faff than they are worth to investigate for the government... streamlining the process should help), but they aren't the real benefit.
So yeah, it's probably fine, and a lot of the shroud-waving about tech conspiracies is misdirected. But some people have such an intense Starmer hatred that anything he proposes must be evil.
Which isn't to say that I wouldn't rather someone better was doing the job. But PM isn't really the sort of role where you can run a recruitment process and decide not to appoint.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
So what would you have Starmer do?
Lay out his programme for government and how he intends balancing the books
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
That's a good answer but it assumes the opponent - in this case Farage - does not react. Farage will. And in the meantime, you are abandoning issues that matter to people to Farage.
The problem as I see it is the PM of our Country is labelling 30-34% of voters as a enemies off the country
It should be remembered Starmer's landslide was won on 33.7%
Don't equate voters with members. Many of the Farage Party's current voters will have voted Conservative in 2019, or Labour in 2017.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Let’s repeat this once again - to work for many firms like Tesco you need a passport to prove you can work in the UK. No passport to hand and they move to the next candidate
That's the issue isn't it; big firms like Tesco obey the law; medium and most small firms do as well. But there are quite a few one (or two) person firms which play cash in hand to short-term, or sometimes even reasonably long term, workers and neither side asks too many questions. We need an enforcement unit doing some checking.
A good point came up in the discussions on the media this morning that those employing illegals already ignore the law and will continue to do so irrespective of ID cards
Which is why the system is coming regardless - because if moves the checks to please give us the reference id for each check - which is validation that it was done correctly or not / and so removes excuses
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Which takes us back to how warped and unhinged the national conversation is.
The way to think about this plan is using technology to make life easier for citizens. Whenever you move house, change jobs, do significant financial transactions or vote in person, you have to prove your identity. At the monent, that involves various degrees of clunkiness- it's not too bad if you have a passport and/or driving licence, but plenty of people don't. (And even then, the paper bank statement/utility bills thing is getting tricky.) Having a thing that you can show that proves who you are and not much else is the sort of incremental improvement that makes everyone's lives a bit better and makes the national administration a bit smoother that governments ought to be doing.
We can't talk about it that way, because all the media want to ask about is the alleged migration crisis. This will probably help a bit there (at the moment, ID checks are more faff than they are worth for microbusinesses, and more faff than they are worth to investigate for the government... streamlining the process should help), but they aren't the real benefit.
So yeah, it's probably fine, and a lot of the shroud-waving about tech conspiracies is misdirected. But some people have such an intense Starmer hatred that anything he proposes must be evil.
Which isn't to say that I wouldn't rather someone better was doing the job. But PM isn't really the sort of role where you can run a recruitment process and decide not to appoint.
It's fortunate that I'm not looking for work as I have neither a driving licence or a valid passport. All I have is an OAP bus pass, with a 20+ year old photo!
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Actually it seems a large number of people from our local council estates post lots of foreign holiday photos on social media
Just checked this with my daughter who has a senior position in the DWP says that a birth certificate is also acceptable
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
No! Starmer needs to attack Farage. He needs to call him out on the tacit pro-Trump anti Vax and quack doctor RFK Jnr health agenda, he needs to call out Reform for the casual and direct racism and Islamophobia. Starmer needs to call Farage's view on Putin and Ukraine. Where they stand on Netanyahu genocide. He needs to call out their funding model for the NHS. He needs to call out their tax cut and service provision agenda.
One of the reasons Reform are so far ahead is they have been given a free ride by politicians and the media.
Your party is delusional and still under the misapprehension that Reform would be a handy junior partner in a ConRef coalition should the Tories fall short of a majority next time. As it stands they will be Farage's little helpers. The Tories should be telling their voters what a Farage Government means to the UK. They are not your friends!
When have I ever said Farage and Reform are my friends ?
I expect Badenoch to layout clear blue water at the conference next week
And I simply do not accept Reform have been given a free ride by the media
I expected a poll drop after their distasteful deportation policy announcements, but Mandelson overtook the news media with more labour sleeze
Of course Starmer should reject Farage and Reform but he is making a mistake calling them and their voters the enemy
I was referring to the Conservative Party as "friends" of Reform not you specifically.
Starmer isn't very good at the cut and thrust of politics. He should be careful about how he frames himself. However if Reformers are voting Reform because they don't like brown people they are the enemy. Voters have every right to voice and opine that immigration over the last five or six years is out of control, but some including Reform politicians have crossed that line. I would say Farage did when he dog whistled a fake news Andrew Tate X post suggesting Rudekabana was an asylum seeker.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Which takes us back to how warped and unhinged the national conversation is.
The way to think about this plan is using technology to make life easier for citizens. Whenever you move house, change jobs, do significant financial transactions or vote in person, you have to prove your identity. At the monent, that involves various degrees of clunkiness- it's not too bad if you have a passport and/or driving licence, but plenty of people don't. (And even then, the paper bank statement/utility bills thing is getting tricky.) Having a thing that you can show that proves who you are and not much else is the sort of incremental improvement that makes everyone's lives a bit better and makes the national administration a bit smoother that governments ought to be doing.
We can't talk about it that way, because all the media want to ask about is the alleged migration crisis. This will probably help a bit there (at the moment, ID checks are more faff than they are worth for microbusinesses, and more faff than they are worth to investigate for the government... streamlining the process should help), but they aren't the real benefit.
So yeah, it's probably fine, and a lot of the shroud-waving about tech conspiracies is misdirected. But some people have such an intense Starmer hatred that anything he proposes must be evil.
Which isn't to say that I wouldn't rather someone better was doing the job. But PM isn't really the sort of role where you can run a recruitment process and decide not to appoint.
It'll be interesting to see how any proposed system handles identity theft.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Actually it seems a large number of people from our local council estates post lots of foreign holiday photos on social media
Nah - it's just that Devon looks foreign to folk in North Wales!
The independence of the Electoral Commission must be fully restored to protect the UK’s electoral integrity from a future authoritarian government, a new report warns.
The Democracy in Danger report by the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption found the UK government was in breach of eight different international standards on ensuring the independence of electoral bodies by maintaining the government’s oversight of the watchdog.
It warned current ministerial power over the Electoral Commission, brought in by Boris Johnson, “could easily be abused to undermine our democracy”.
Whether one likes it or not, the Electoral Commission was created by statute and remains subject to parliamentary intervention at all times. There is no alternative supreme authority to oversee the supreme authority.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and there is no other answer to 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes'. Though the separation of powers helps, until, as in process in the USA, it is abolished by force.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
This is not a prediction.
Where is there any evidence that Starmer believes he can't do the job and will admit to it?
With current PMs it is in the nature of the job that there isn't direct evidence until there is, at which point he is no longer PM.
Sunak I think packed it in without admitting that really the job wasn't for him but I think he realised it wasn't. But the rest weren't going anywhere without being shoved and even to this day are arguing I was well go at the job or the deep state stopped me being well good.
I think Sunak - and May before him - could have been a reasonable PM in reasonable times. But the times were not reasonable: the party had been in power for a decade and was out of ideas; the party was riven; we were coming out of a massive crisis (Covid) that they had had to manage, and the economy was in a poor state. He also had only a couple of years to turn the boat around before a GE.
I don't think any UK politician, of any party, could have navigated that situation and won the GE.
Starmer has a much better inheritance. He has a massive majority; he has loads of fresh MPs in the party (both a positive and a negative...), and whilst the economy is still poorish, the party *should* be easy to manage given the massive win he's given them. And he had four or five years to get the job started before the next GE.
But he's probably doing a worse job than Sunak.
At the time of the election, when advocating for Sunak, I was often told he was appalling and Starmer couldn't possibly be worse.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
No! Starmer needs to attack Farage. He needs to call him out on the tacit pro-Trump anti Vax and quack doctor RFK Jnr health agenda, he needs to call out Reform for the casual and direct racism and Islamophobia. Starmer needs to call Farage's view on Putin and Ukraine. Where they stand on Netanyahu genocide. He needs to call out their funding model for the NHS. He needs to call out their tax cut and service provision agenda.
One of the reasons Reform are so far ahead is they have been given a free ride by politicians and the media.
Your party is delusional and still under the misapprehension that Reform would be a handy junior partner in a ConRef coalition should the Tories fall short of a majority next time. As it stands they will be Farage's little helpers. The Tories should be telling their voters what a Farage Government means to the UK. They are not your friends!
When have I ever said Farage and Reform are my friends ?
I expect Badenoch to layout clear blue water at the conference next week
And I simply do not accept Reform have been given a free ride by the media
I expected a poll drop after their distasteful deportation policy announcements, but Mandelson overtook the news media with more labour sleeze
Of course Starmer should reject Farage and Reform but he is making a mistake calling them and their voters the enemy
I think Labour do have a tactical difficulty here. I can see why calling out Reform as extreme, unserious and affiliated with some questionable agendas is a good idea - you need to define your opponent.
But there is a balance to be struck. The more you attack parties like Reform using terms like racist, the more (although Labour are at pains to stress otherwise) you can come under fire from people tempted to vote Reform who think you’re tarring them with the same brush. Going all-in on the extremist/dangerous angle can backfire. I think it backfired on the Democrats in 2016 and 2024, against Trump.
The other element is how much you try and fight on the populist right’s turf vs how much you try and change the argument. Labour do need to get a grip on immigration, but I think they are better served by trying to get numbers down and economic metrics up - while focussing more on their bread and butter like the NHS. Starmer’s latest tactical wheeze is to make the debate one around patriotism, the flag, ‘noisy’ policies like ID Cards, trying to outflank Reform on immigration and national identity. This, I would suggest, is doomed to fail. It will amplify the Reform message, it comes off as disingenuous, and it is very hard to win against a populist on their own turf - they will always have simpler, more attractive policies to those voters.
I can often criticise Labour for the myriad tactical errors they have made so far (which they have) but I do acknowledge that there is no single cure-all or smart way forwards, no magic bullet for them. This is in part because they have already shown themselves to have no unifying vision for government, so trying to introduce a trajectory/path forwards now does look reactive and panicky.
Is there some significant psychological barrier crossed when the Tories come fifth? Surely fourth would be bad enough
Anyway I love these polls. A plague on both their houses
Yes, right now some Tories have been able to argue that being third in the polls is due to Starmer being rubbish and boosting Reform, but ending up consistently fourth/fifth behind the Greens/Lib Dems will be a barrier crossed.
I agree, I was just querying that distinction twixt 4th and 5th
This feels like a death spiral now, for the Tories. As you say there’s a tipping point when they look terminally irrelevant and any vote for them is wasted. They are horribly close to that point, and it’s not obvious how they reverse the slide. Dumping poor Kemi is necessary - but not sufficient
Labour have different problems. Unlikely to go extinct but facing a defeat so bad they are out of power for 15 years
Perhaps.
I am writing a piece which should go up later on this week which points out based on the MRPs/polls Reform are on course to win the election with a lower vote share/votes than Labour in 2024 (The YouGov MRP had them on 27%) and we saw how unpopular Labour became.
I reckon within a year of the next election Reform could be in the single digits and we end up with a very left wing party leading the polls such as the Greens.
That’s the consensus prediction at Knapper’s Gazette, interestingly
Reform win, fuck it all up, and the NEXT government is far left
It is quite possible, especially as by then we may need UBI
We are in a hi-tech rehash of the 1930s
Taxi driving is about to go the way of the dodo. Waymo has proved it works and Tesla are about to revolutionise building of autonomous vehicles with their new process. I don't know how many people work in car transportation but we should expect it to drop by over 90% in the next decade and for delivery driver pay to crash due to oversupply of qualified drivers.
Maybe but much of Britain is not like the wide, open highways of China and the United States where these self-driving cars are developed. Our roads are narrow, congested and often have cyclists and pedestrians complicating matters. (Come to think of it, was it @Gallowgate who recently posted about how busy the M25 is even at 4am? One of pb's northerners anyway.)
Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
I know several Americans who refuse to drive on British roads because they are too narrow.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
So what would you have Starmer do?
Lay out his programme for government and how he intends balancing the books
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
That's a good answer but it assumes the opponent - in this case Farage - does not react. Farage will. And in the meantime, you are abandoning issues that matter to people to Farage.
The problem as I see it is the PM of our Country is labelling 30-34% of voters as a enemies off the country
It should be remembered Starmer's landslide was won on 33.7%
Don't equate voters with members. Many of the Farage Party's current voters will have voted Conservative in 2019, or Labour in 2017.
Here's the insanely complicated flow diagram you didn't know you wanted. Fortunately, the title says it all.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
I ended my subscription to The Economist over 15 years ago for that very reason.
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
Interesting and the word optional is the key difference between Starmer mandating them [I expect the idea will be quietly dropped in the fullness of time]
Here is what the government has said about its plans so far;
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
The problem with that is mission creep and I really do not expect it to become law
Next time I’m in Llandudno - I will take you to a council estate where I can guarantee 50% won’t have the passport required to meet the employment requirement of a national firm.
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
Actually it seems a large number of people from our local council estates post lots of foreign holiday photos on social media
Just checked this with my daughter who has a senior position in the DWP says that a birth certificate is also acceptable
A UK birth certificate is not proof of UK citizenship for those born after some date in the 1980s.
Is there some significant psychological barrier crossed when the Tories come fifth? Surely fourth would be bad enough
Anyway I love these polls. A plague on both their houses
Yes, right now some Tories have been able to argue that being third in the polls is due to Starmer being rubbish and boosting Reform, but ending up consistently fourth/fifth behind the Greens/Lib Dems will be a barrier crossed.
I agree, I was just querying that distinction twixt 4th and 5th
This feels like a death spiral now, for the Tories. As you say there’s a tipping point when they look terminally irrelevant and any vote for them is wasted. They are horribly close to that point, and it’s not obvious how they reverse the slide. Dumping poor Kemi is necessary - but not sufficient
Labour have different problems. Unlikely to go extinct but facing a defeat so bad they are out of power for 15 years
Perhaps.
I am writing a piece which should go up later on this week which points out based on the MRPs/polls Reform are on course to win the election with a lower vote share/votes than Labour in 2024 (The YouGov MRP had them on 27%) and we saw how unpopular Labour became.
I reckon within a year of the next election Reform could be in the single digits and we end up with a very left wing party leading the polls such as the Greens.
That’s the consensus prediction at Knapper’s Gazette, interestingly
Reform win, fuck it all up, and the NEXT government is far left
It is quite possible, especially as by then we may need UBI
We are in a hi-tech rehash of the 1930s
Taxi driving is about to go the way of the dodo. Waymo has proved it works and Tesla are about to revolutionise building of autonomous vehicles with their new process. I don't know how many people work in car transportation but we should expect it to drop by over 90% in the next decade and for delivery driver pay to crash due to oversupply of qualified drivers.
Maybe but much of Britain is not like the wide, open highways of China and the United States where these self-driving cars are developed. Our roads are narrow, congested and often have cyclists and pedestrians complicating matters. (Come to think of it, was it @Gallowgate who recently posted about how busy the M25 is even at 4am? One of pb's northerners anyway.)
Always been puzzled by this argument. If an American can learn to drive on British roads, then so can an AI that is able to drive on US roads.
I know several Americans who refuse to drive on British roads because they are too narrow.
Surely they are squeezed into their cars though, and they're standard width.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
The Economist has always been written by precocious 22 year olds with no life experience who have been given the editorial goal of making their readers feel smart. (Bagehot might be the exception to this age rule IIRC.)
Growing up is realising this & treating the opinions of Economist writers accordingly: they can be insightful but too often they are shallow & lacking in rigour. Ultimately it’s just more journalism & thus unable to escape the inevitable flaws that endeavour brings.
That's a shame. I was working for AMV on Volvo during the time David Abbott was doing his best work for the Economist. He elevated poster advertising above most else that was being done at the time. It won everything going and deservedly. If only they had writers like him working for the title.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
The Economist has always been written by precocious 22 year olds with no life experience who have been given the editorial goal of making their readers feel smart. (Bagehot might be the exception to this age rule IIRC.)
Growing up is realising this & treating the opinions of Economist writers accordingly: they can be insightful but too often they are shallow & lacking in rigour. Ultimately it’s just more journalism & thus unable to escape the inevitable flaws that endeavour brings.
That's a shame. I was working for AMV on Volvo during the time David Abbott was doing his best work for the Economist. He elevated poster advertising above most else that was being done at the time. It won everything going and deservedly. If only they had writers like him working for the title.
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
No! Starmer needs to attack Farage. He needs to call him out on the tacit pro-Trump anti Vax and quack doctor RFK Jnr health agenda, he needs to call out Reform for the casual and direct racism and Islamophobia. Starmer needs to call Farage's view on Putin and Ukraine. Where they stand on Netanyahu genocide. He needs to call out their funding model for the NHS. He needs to call out their tax cut and service provision agenda.
One of the reasons Reform are so far ahead is they have been given a free ride by politicians and the media.
Your party is delusional and still under the misapprehension that Reform would be a handy junior partner in a ConRef coalition should the Tories fall short of a majority next time. As it stands they will be Farage's little helpers. The Tories should be telling their voters what a Farage Government means to the UK. They are not your friends!
When have I ever said Farage and Reform are my friends ?
I expect Badenoch to layout clear blue water at the conference next week
And I simply do not accept Reform have been given a free ride by the media
I expected a poll drop after their distasteful deportation policy announcements, but Mandelson overtook the news media with more labour sleeze
Of course Starmer should reject Farage and Reform but he is making a mistake calling them and their voters the enemy
I think Labour do have a tactical difficulty here. I can see why calling out Reform as extreme, unserious and affiliated with some questionable agendas is a good idea - you need to define your opponent.
But there is a balance to be struck. The more you attack parties like Reform using terms like racist, the more (although Labour are at pains to stress otherwise) you can come under fire from people tempted to vote Reform who think you’re tarring them with the same brush. Going all-in on the extremist/dangerous angle can backfire. I think it backfired on the Democrats in 2016 and 2024, against Trump.
The other element is how much you try and fight on the populist right’s turf vs how much you try and change the argument. Labour do need to get a grip on immigration, but I think they are better served by trying to get numbers down and economic metrics up - while focussing more on their bread and butter like the NHS. Starmer’s latest tactical wheeze is to make the debate one around patriotism, the flag, ‘noisy’ policies like ID Cards, trying to outflank Reform on immigration and national identity. This, I would suggest, is doomed to fail. It will amplify the Reform message, it comes off as disingenuous, and it is very hard to win against a populist on their own turf - they will always have simpler, more attractive policies to those voters.
I can often criticise Labour for the myriad tactical errors they have made so far (which they have) but I do acknowledge that there is no single cure-all or smart way forwards, no magic bullet for them. This is in part because they have already shown themselves to have no unifying vision for government, so trying to introduce a trajectory/path forwards now does look reactive and panicky.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
This is not a prediction.
Where is there any evidence that Starmer believes he can't do the job and will admit to it?
With current PMs it is in the nature of the job that there isn't direct evidence until there is, at which point he is no longer PM.
Sunak I think packed it in without admitting that really the job wasn't for him but I think he realised it wasn't. But the rest weren't going anywhere without being shoved and even to this day are arguing I was well go at the job or the deep state stopped me being well good.
I think Sunak - and May before him - could have been a reasonable PM in reasonable times. But the times were not reasonable: the party had been in power for a decade and was out of ideas; the party was riven; we were coming out of a massive crisis (Covid) that they had had to manage, and the economy was in a poor state. He also had only a couple of years to turn the boat around before a GE.
I don't think any UK politician, of any party, could have navigated that situation and won the GE.
Starmer has a much better inheritance. He has a massive majority; he has loads of fresh MPs in the party (both a positive and a negative...), and whilst the economy is still poorish, the party *should* be easy to manage given the massive win he's given them. And he had four or five years to get the job started before the next GE.
But he's probably doing a worse job than Sunak.
At the time of the election, when advocating for Sunak, I was often told he was appalling and Starmer couldn't possibly be worse.
And yet here we are.
I was generally quite sympathetic towards the position Sunak found himself in, for the reasons outlined above. And I believe I said so at the time (I also said that I would not want to be anyone making decisions during Covid, as you were bound to be castigated for the decisions later).
However, I remember he made one or two startling decisions that made me decide I couldn't support him. Annoyingly I cannot remember what they were, although I think my views were well outlined on here.
The thing that gets me about Starmer is that he and too many people in his government are getting caught out doing similar things to the things they castigated the last government for - the personal grifting being just one example. I fear this appears to many voters as though Labour and Conservatives are both the same.
Straw in the wind: The Economist rather has it in for Starmer at the moment and suggest this week he might do a Keegan and decide he just isn't quite good enough and go.
To go soon would have a double effect; he would be free at one bound of a job he isn't great at and (if it is true he can't stand Burnham) he would dish Burnham's chances almost absolutely until after 2028/9.
I have been a subscriber the The Economist for decades, but increasingly it is becoming unreadable. They used to be generally astute, now they are not even as astute as other media outlets. When they write about subjects I know a bit about, they make often fairly elementary errors. I'll give it a few months for old times sake, but I can increasingly do without yet another load of partisan biased, borderline silly journalism. If I want a pretentious right wing comic, there's always The Spectator.
The Economist has always been written by precocious 22 year olds with no life experience who have been given the editorial goal of making their readers feel smart. (Bagehot might be the exception to this age rule IIRC.)
Growing up is realising this & treating the opinions of Economist writers accordingly: they can be insightful but too often they are shallow & lacking in rigour. Ultimately it’s just more journalism & thus unable to escape the inevitable flaws that endeavour brings.
That's a shame. I was working for AMV on Volvo during the time David Abbott was doing his best work for the Economist. He elevated poster advertising above most else that was being done at the time. It won everything going and deservedly. If only they had writers like him working for the title.
Very clever, very snappy... for good or ill, much like the magazine.
(For quite a while, their science section was the best thing to encourage bright sixth formers to read- broad coverage, right sort of length and depth, broadsheet papers had given up on regular science coverage and New Scientist turned to mush ages ago. Don't know what it's like now- I let my subscription lapse ages ago, due to it being too expensive and too annoying.)
Gosh, there's some snowflakes on here. Of course Reform are Labour's 'enemy', just as the Tories have always been Labour's enemy. And vice versa. It's political, not personal, obviously.
Time for Starmer to ramp it up. Give all the racists both barrels. Time to let people take sides. If he does it now he's got it in the bag. I've just listened to a prog about the flag war which is happening in Leeds.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
The problem is people are taking sides and it's Farage's
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
So what would you have Starmer do?
Lay out his programme for government and how he intends balancing the books
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
That's a good answer but it assumes the opponent - in this case Farage - does not react. Farage will. And in the meantime, you are abandoning issues that matter to people to Farage.
The problem as I see it is the PM of our Country is labelling 30-34% of voters as a enemies off the country
It should be remembered Starmer's landslide was won on 33.7%
Don't equate voters with members. Many of the Farage Party's current voters will have voted Conservative in 2019, or Labour in 2017.
Here's the insanely complicated flow diagram you didn't know you wanted. Fortunately, the title says it all.
Comments
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1972231946463052141
I mean, factually that might be true but ye gods, he’s really not very good at this presentational stuff is he?
"Never kissed a Reformer" should be Kemi's red cap of choice.
https://x.com/Peston/status/1972228121106513985
The Democracy in Danger report by the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption found the UK government was in breach of eight different international standards on ensuring the independence of electoral bodies by maintaining the government’s oversight of the watchdog.
It warned current ministerial power over the Electoral Commission, brought in by Boris Johnson, “could easily be abused to undermine our democracy”.
Why have I not done this before ?
I don't think any UK politician, of any party, could have navigated that situation and won the GE.
Starmer has a much better inheritance. He has a massive majority; he has loads of fresh MPs in the party (both a positive and a negative...), and whilst the economy is still poorish, the party *should* be easy to manage given the massive win he's given them. And he had four or five years to get the job started before the next GE.
But he's probably doing a worse job than Sunak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo5AwMfFXnA
She makes lots of interesting points about why she thinks this is the case.
.......It's essential he doesn't equivocate. The moral high ground is waiting for him. The Flag flyers of Leeds were morons and racists. No apology to any of them required. Just a bit of backbone to keep some of his Red Wall MPs on board -(though in truth I don't think he needs them).
Growing up is realising this & treating the opinions of Economist writers accordingly: they can be insightful but too often they are shallow & lacking in rigour. Ultimately it’s just more journalism & thus unable to escape the inevitable flaws that endeavour brings.
(Hence the old joke about the House of Commons)
'Chelsea play pointless West Ham.'
These days there’s probably a fair bit of AI involved too.
And the cheese was rank too...
That's a horrible thing to say.
It should have been, 'Opponents are different from enemies.'
"Berlin Station" is not a TV series about the Hauptbahnhof.
The more Starmer attacks Farage as the enemy, the more he loses because he is taking on between 30-34% of the public including ex labour voters
You really do not understand what is at play here do you ?
He will never beat Farage on immigration, or the boats, and proposing ID cards to solve the problem is the lawyer in him seeing everything as a lawyer needing more and more laws and regulations and immediately upsetting a lot of people including his mps
Of course Farage is a problem but Starmer is PM and needs to get Farage out of his head
A referendum in Switzerland to decide whether to introduce electronic identity cards is taking place, with initial projections suggesting voters are evenly split.
It is the second nationwide ballot on the issue, after the idea was rejected in 2021 over data protection concerns and unease over the proposed system being largely run by private firms.
Under the revised proposal, the new system would remain entirely optional and in public hands, with data stored on users' smartphones rather than centrally.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/28/watching-caerphilly-welsh-byelection-may-be-bellwether-for-political-transformation-in-uk?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
https://x.com/i/status/1971896731739774988
It should be remembered Starmer's landslide was won on 33.7%
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-id-scheme-explainer/digital-id-scheme-explainer
Of course there will be some spin here. But it's a very long way from the proposal to the scheme that people are filling a petition out against. As far as I can tell from the government explainer, the only situation where it will be essential is for people taking up new jobs. In theory, those checks should already be happening, and they are a bit of a pain, as @eek has pointed out.
We need an enforcement unit doing some checking.
One of the reasons Reform are so far ahead is they have been given a free ride by politicians and the media.
Your party is delusional and still under the misapprehension that Reform would be a handy junior partner in a ConRef coalition should the Tories fall short of a majority next time. As it stands they will be Farage's little helpers. The Tories should be telling their voters what a Farage Government means to the UK. They are not your friends!
But hey you are more concerned about x then making it possible to get a job.
Worse the database is going to be implemented anyway so let’s give people the small benefits that can be derived from it
I expect Badenoch to layout clear blue water at the conference next week
And I simply do not accept Reform have been given a free ride by the media
I expected a poll drop after their distasteful deportation policy announcements, but Mandelson overtook the news media with more labour sleeze
Of course Starmer should reject Farage and Reform but he is making a mistake calling them and their voters the enemy
I recall the time, many years ago, when I was running a small group of pharmacies. I employed a pharmacist ..... yes he'd got the relevant certificate ...... as a branch manager, pointing out in doing so that he'd have to deliver the occasional oxygen cylinder, something pharmacies did back in the 70's. Had he got a car? Yes, and he'd be driving to work in it. So no problem.
A couple of months later it turned out that while he had a car he didn't have a driving licence. Perhaps naively, I'd assumed that a professional colleague wouldn't drive without a licence.
Anyway hard words were said and shortly afterwards he left.
The way to think about this plan is using technology to make life easier for citizens. Whenever you move house, change jobs, do significant financial transactions or vote in person, you have to prove your identity. At the monent, that involves various degrees of clunkiness- it's not too bad if you have a passport and/or driving licence, but plenty of people don't. (And even then, the paper bank statement/utility bills thing is getting tricky.) Having a thing that you can show that proves who you are and not much else is the sort of incremental improvement that makes everyone's lives a bit better and makes the national administration a bit smoother that governments ought to be doing.
We can't talk about it that way, because all the media want to ask about is the alleged migration crisis. This will probably help a bit there (at the moment, ID checks are more faff than they are worth for microbusinesses, and more faff than they are worth to investigate for the government... streamlining the process should help), but they aren't the real benefit.
So yeah, it's probably fine, and a lot of the shroud-waving about tech conspiracies is misdirected. But some people have such an intense Starmer hatred that anything he proposes must be evil.
Which isn't to say that I wouldn't rather someone better was doing the job. But PM isn't really the sort of role where you can run a recruitment process and decide not to appoint.
I would be more inclined to Electronic ID if it were optional and had nothing to do with Theil and his ilk.
Starmer isn't very good at the cut and thrust of politics. He should be careful about how he frames himself. However if Reformers are voting Reform because they don't like brown people they are the enemy. Voters have every right to voice and opine that immigration over the last five or six years is out of control, but some including Reform politicians have crossed that line. I would say Farage did when he dog whistled a fake news Andrew Tate X post suggesting Rudekabana was an asylum seeker.
Call the b**tards out!
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and there is no other answer to 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes'. Though the separation of powers helps, until, as in process in the USA, it is abolished by force.
I don't like people who could cause immense harm obsessing with the eschaton and katechon.
And yet here we are.
But there is a balance to be struck. The more you attack parties like Reform using terms like racist, the more (although Labour are at pains to stress otherwise) you can come under fire from people tempted to vote Reform who think you’re tarring them with the same brush. Going all-in on the extremist/dangerous angle can backfire. I think it backfired on the Democrats in 2016 and 2024, against Trump.
The other element is how much you try and fight on the populist right’s turf vs how much you try and change the argument. Labour do need to get a grip on immigration, but I think they are better served by trying to get numbers down and economic metrics up - while focussing more on their bread and butter like the NHS. Starmer’s latest tactical wheeze is to make the debate one around patriotism, the flag, ‘noisy’ policies like ID Cards, trying to outflank Reform on immigration and national identity. This, I would suggest, is doomed to fail. It will amplify the Reform message, it comes off as disingenuous, and it is very hard to win against a populist on their own turf - they will always have simpler, more attractive policies to those voters.
I can often criticise Labour for the myriad tactical errors they have made so far (which they have) but I do acknowledge that there is no single cure-all or smart way forwards, no magic bullet for them. This is in part because they have already shown themselves to have no unifying vision for government, so trying to introduce a trajectory/path forwards now does look reactive and panicky.
(Although, more likely he will pass an Executive Order for the state to fund 1,000 more golf courses to get the American game improving.
All of which will transfer to the ownership of the Trump Presidential Library at the end of his term...)
https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/media/p3wlq2v0/from-protest-to-power-mic-ukice.pdf
No details.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly622k0jm4o
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3wxp213q18o
(If you've never been, you might think all Oxfordshire towns are wealthy; Banbury's actually pretty rough.)
However, I remember he made one or two startling decisions that made me decide I couldn't support him. Annoyingly I cannot remember what they were, although I think my views were well outlined on here.
The thing that gets me about Starmer is that he and too many people in his government are getting caught out doing similar things to the things they castigated the last government for - the personal grifting being just one example. I fear this appears to many voters as though Labour and Conservatives are both the same.
It's a good job the Farage Party isn't the same.
It's worse...
(For quite a while, their science section was the best thing to encourage bright sixth formers to read- broad coverage, right sort of length and depth, broadsheet papers had given up on regular science coverage and New Scientist turned to mush ages ago. Don't know what it's like now- I let my subscription lapse ages ago, due to it being too expensive and too annoying.)