Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."
Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children.
Pederasty is a sexual attraction to teenagers.
British law discriminates between the two, having sex with a girl under 13 is specifically a different and more serious offence than having sex with a girl under 16.
Epstein was likely most attracted to collecting blackmail material on those who visited his island, he wanted 15 year olds dressed up to look like 19 year olds.
And having sex with a girl under 18 is IIRC illegal too, in certain scenarios such as prostitution, or if you are in a position of authority over them (eg carers, teachers etc).
The idea 16 is blanket age of consent is not quite right.
Either way though, 15 is not barely legal. It might be less harshly penalised, but it is still outright illegal.
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
There are four jokes, one must never tell at functions, in mixed company.
The Auschwitz Watchtower joke, the bear-buggering joke, the sheep’s a bloody liar joke, and the paedophile joke.
I hope the news that Reeves is leaking she won't increase income tax does not mean she will be increasing national insurance instead.
NI is much worse than income tax, it is a tax only on those working for a living.
No, she is instead likely to lower the thresholds for higher rate and additional rate income tax and maybe even basic rate income tax so more pay at those bands and increase tax on expensive properties and raise tax on gamblers based on what the FT have said today
The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .
Uk govt spending per year is £1.3tn.
If you ask the OBR at three different points of the year to estimate the fiscal hole, you might well get answers of 20, 40, 60bn. 20bn is close to a rounding error in our spending.
We need to stop making radically different plans based on their estimate which is another term for educated and calculated guess.
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Also digging up arcane terminology. I haven't heard the expression 'paed****t' since I last read a book on everyday life in ancient Athens.
The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .
Yes, that may well account for the change in tune.
It is rather ridiculous that forecasts looking years ahead drive so many of these decisions. Its like the weather, completely innaccurate after a certain time.
The thread header simply shows how bizarre our politics have become
Starmer and Reeves are hopeless, bending to every criticism and cowardly opting out of the right thing to do in favour of their desire for their perceived popularity which in itself is plainly on the floor
Predictably bond rates are not impressed
Though still lower than they have been most of the year.
Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."
Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children.
Pederasty is a sexual attraction to teenagers.
British law discriminates between the two, having sex with a girl under 13 is specifically a different and more serious offence than having sex with a girl under 16.
Epstein was likely most attracted to collecting blackmail material on those who visited his island, he wanted 15 year olds dressed up to look like 19 year olds.
Pederasty is sex specifically with boys.
Sex with 15 year olds, especially trafficked 15 year olds, is a crime in most places.
The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .
Yes, that may well account for the change in tune.
It is rather ridiculous that forecasts looking years ahead drive so many of these decisions. Its like the weather, completely innaccurate after a certain time.
And the forecast seems to be changing daily. How can you base decisions which will apply for years on forecasts that change on a daily basis?
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
There are four jokes, one must never tell at functions, in mixed company.
The Auschwitz Watchtower joke, the bear-buggering joke, the sheep’s a bloody liar joke, and the paedophile joke.
I’ve told all of those jokes, and worse.
When dial up internet was a thing, I spent 2 days downloading a film called ‘Bald and barely legal’, imagine my horror when it turned out to be a film about tyres.
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
In two and a half minutes, Jimmy Carr tells an American audience why capitalism is better than communism, and the difference between socialist and woke. ETA nsfw language. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zMmjKRettxA
Some nice clips. I did a commercial with Dick Emery ( the second clip in) and we shot in Bray studios. That night we were booked into the best restaurant in town and as we walked in I was stopped and told I couldn't come in with jeans and no jacket. Dick Emery who was behind me then said 'Right team out we go!'...... The Maitre d then realising who we were with litteraly grovelled. 'Too late' shouted Emery and off we went.
Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."
Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Also digging up arcane terminology. I haven't heard the expression 'paed****t' since I last read a book on everyday life in ancient Athens.
The more one reads about life in Athens, and classical Greece generally, the more it appears an utter horror show, of rape, child sexual abuse, infanticide, kinslaying, human trafficking etc.
Whilst debating deep philosophy. Always beware philosophers, for they can find a justification for anything.
Increasingly, I’m of the view that the Persians were the slightly better side.
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Strange though that these issues of agency and age are only raised as mitigation in the context of rich white men. Raise the same issues about other trafficking rings and expect a very different reaction.
Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."
Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children.
Pederasty is a sexual attraction to teenagers.
British law discriminates between the two, having sex with a girl under 13 is specifically a different and more serious offence than having sex with a girl under 16.
Epstein was likely most attracted to collecting blackmail material on those who visited his island, he wanted 15 year olds dressed up to look like 19 year olds.
And having sex with a girl under 18 is IIRC illegal too, in certain scenarios such as prostitution, or if you are in a position of authority over them (eg carers, teachers etc).
The idea 16 is blanket age of consent is not quite right.
Either way though, 15 is not barely legal. It might be less harshly penalised, but it is still outright illegal.
Yes true, the age of consent is 18 where there’s a relationship of trust between the two parties (teacher and student, for example) or when money is paid. In the UK.
15 is illegal in both UK and I think everywhere in US. Fine in France and Spain though.
My original point was that Megyn Kelly is correct that there’s a big difference between an attraction to teenagers, and an attraction to kids at the start of primary school. Both in language and in law.
My personal view is that the age of consent should be 18, a unified age of majority.
In two and a half minutes, Jimmy Carr tells an American audience why capitalism is better than communism, and the difference between socialist and woke. ETA nsfw language. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zMmjKRettxA
I particularly liked the bit where he said it was OK to play the Riyadh Comedy Festival even though the regime disassembled a dissident with secateurs whilst alive. Cracked me up, that: oh Jimmy, you wag.
"Here’s an extraordinarily cynical take: did the government talk up the likelihood of a manifesto-breaking income tax rise in the knowledge that it would push down gilt yields in the window the OBR will use for its forecasts?"
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
You make a good and plausible case on this even though I disagree with your conclusion.
"Here’s an extraordinarily cynical take: did the government talk up the likelihood of a manifesto-breaking income tax rise in the knowledge that it would push down gilt yields in the window the OBR will use for its forecasts?"
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
'The wall belongs to Osborne's neighbour James Reed, the tycoon behind Reed Recruitment who has been critical of Labour's economic policies. 'I'm surprised that whichever of my neighbours he happened to be visiting didn't offer him a toilet. It doesn't seem very diplomatic,' Mr Reed told the Daily Mail.
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
Not only did the Ukrainians hit the oil terminal in Novorossiysk (the explosion there was massive), and air defences there, but they also hit the Saratov oil refinery again and a fuel depot near the Engels airbase.
Meanwhile the Russians hit nearly a dozen apartment blocks in Kyiv.
Pokrovsk is the sharp end of the "giving up land to buy time" strategy. In this time that the Ukrainians have kept the Russians out of Povrosk (and it is still significantly contested) the Ukrainians have done vast damage to the Russian economy. One town nobody had ever heard of before the war in exchange for smashing dozens of oil refineries, oil storage and loading facilities nobody ever heard of - but are integral to a functioning hydrocarbons exploitation that funds Putin's war.
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
Should it be the case for ALL elected officials right down to Town and Parish councils that if you cease to be a member of the party for whom you were elected, you are forced to resign and a new election is called?
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .
Uk govt spending per year is £1.3tn.
If you ask the OBR at three different points of the year to estimate the fiscal hole, you might well get answers of 20, 40, 60bn. 20bn is close to a rounding error in our spending.
We need to stop making radically different plans based on their estimate which is another term for educated and calculated guess.
The reason for this is that we've promised the bond markets that we have a plan to balance the budget in five years time, and it's on the basis of this promise that they are relatively sanguine about lending us vast sums of money. This means that our fiscal reputation is reliant on financial forecasts, which will fluctuate and are imprecise. This is not a problem if we have a safety margin - the forecasts can fluctuate within the safety margin and the plans do not need to radically change. We do not have a safety margin.
There are two alternatives. Establish fiscal responsibility by cutting the budget deficit in reality, rather than on paper, in the future. Or re-establish the safety margin in the plans, so that fluctuations in the forecast can be ignored. Both of these alternatives involve making more spending cuts, or tax increases, than the status quo.
That's why we are where we are.
EDIT: If we simply decide to ignore the OBR, then Britain loses its fiscal credibility and is forced into cutting the budget deficit rather quickly.
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
Should it be the case for ALL elected officials right down to Town and Parish councils that if you cease to be a member of the party for whom you were elected, you are forced to resign and a new election is called?
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
Like @isam I don't like a change of PM mid government (other than death or very serious illness) nor defections without by-elections.
They are rare however, and rarely work out well for the parties or individuals concerned, and this does seem to limit how often it happens.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
That's what Tony Blair was good at in the early years and he showed you could remain human and do it with charm. Still the best PM in my lifetime by a country mile.....
'The wall belongs to Osborne's neighbour James Reed, the tycoon behind Reed Recruitment who has been critical of Labour's economic policies. 'I'm surprised that whichever of my neighbours he happened to be visiting didn't offer him a toilet. It doesn't seem very diplomatic,' Mr Reed told the Daily Mail.
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
Outside football grounds it is not uncommon to see signs warning of on-the-spot fines for this.
Is that a warning that is never actually enforced?
The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .
Uk govt spending per year is £1.3tn.
If you ask the OBR at three different points of the year to estimate the fiscal hole, you might well get answers of 20, 40, 60bn. 20bn is close to a rounding error in our spending.
We need to stop making radically different plans based on their estimate which is another term for educated and calculated guess.
The reason for this is that we've promised the bond markets that we have a plan to balance the budget in five years time, and it's on the basis of this promise that they are relatively sanguine about lending us vast sums of money. This means that our fiscal reputation is reliant on financial forecasts, which will fluctuate and are imprecise. This is not a problem if we have a safety margin - the forecasts can fluctuate within the safety margin and the plans do not need to radically change. We do not have a safety margin.
There are two alternatives. Establish fiscal responsibility by cutting the budget deficit in reality, rather than on paper, in the future. Or re-establish the safety margin in the plans, so that fluctuations in the forecast can be ignored. Both of these alternatives involve making more spending cuts, or tax increases, than the status quo.
That's why we are where we are.
EDIT: If we simply decide to ignore the OBR, then Britain loses its fiscal credibility and is forced into cutting the budget deficit rather quickly.
We haven't promised to balance our budget in 5 years (now 4 technically). What we have promised is that at that point the deficit will be falling as a share of GDP which is by no means the same thing. What the OBR are supposed to be doing is measuring our progress towards that Nirvana and it is pointing out we are not on track.
And it will have to keep pointing this out because our underlying fiscal situation is deteriorating, not improving. We have absolutely minimal growth, a very large deficit, a serious increase in the cost of our debt mountain (not entirely sure I mountain quite covers it anymore) and pressure on the defence budget. Even worse we have a government that refuses to recognise all of this and who will try to find spending cuts to even offset these pressures.
Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."
Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
Should it be the case for ALL elected officials right down to Town and Parish councils that if you cease to be a member of the party for whom you were elected, you are forced to resign and a new election is called?
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
Like @isam I don't like a change of PM mid government (other than death or very serious illness) nor defections without by-elections.
They are rare however, and rarely work out well for the parties or individuals concerned, and this does seem to limit how often it happens.
We might look at 2010-24 and see the Conservatives had five Prime Ministers in that period - Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak but, to be fair, from 1951-64, they went through Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Hume so not unprecdented.
Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."
Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
This is the same Megyn Kelly loudly calling for the Epstein files to be released in full.
Until someone from the Trump regime had a quiet word.
This cabal are getting horribly tied in knots. Their previous support for release is all on record. There is no reason for them to have done a 180. Other than "Oh shit....."
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
Dafuq?
15 year olds aren't barely legal. They're patently illegal.
There's a big weight on age gap, and for "unrestricted" age gaps NY is 17, New Jersey 18, Florida is 18.
I'm not sure about worldwide jurisdiction wrt to the aircraft (as we have here in measure). Looking at commentary I have seen, I'm not seeing an awareness yet of related trafficking offences - and how eg a man could potentially be complicit in trafficking for offences related to massages. Similarly for conspiracy.
This will continue for weeks.
One to watch imo is people who became eg US Ambassadors, as they have a "rich political buddy or donor reward" practice for much of that.
I hope the news that Reeves is leaking she won't increase income tax does not mean she will be increasing national insurance instead.
NI is much worse than income tax, it is a tax only on those working for a living.
No, she is instead likely to lower the thresholds for higher rate and additional rate income tax and maybe even basic rate income tax so more pay at those bands and increase tax on expensive properties and raise tax on gamblers based on what the FT have said today
Yes and get even less money in the end, these people are thick as mince.
Ministerial by-elections were abolished to help aid government stability. Prime ministerial general elections feel like they would massively increase that instability. OTOH, the FTPA was probably a step too far in that it enshrined a lame duck with the instability that came with that.
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
Even then the LDs would likely win more seats than the Greens and Labour, as I already posted Davey has a higher favourability rating now with 2024 Labour voters than either Starmer or Polanski do
The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .
Uk govt spending per year is £1.3tn.
If you ask the OBR at three different points of the year to estimate the fiscal hole, you might well get answers of 20, 40, 60bn. 20bn is close to a rounding error in our spending.
We need to stop making radically different plans based on their estimate which is another term for educated and calculated guess.
If we weren't running deficits and were running balanced budgets, with deficits used only to manage swings and roundabouts, then we wouldn't need to radically amend plans.
The problem is trying to live on the edge of a maxed out credit card leaves no room for manoeuvre.
Talk of £20 billion black holes when our deficit is nearly 7 times that amount is the reason we are in that mess.
Not only did the Ukrainians hit the oil terminal in Novorossiysk (the explosion there was massive), and air defences there, but they also hit the Saratov oil refinery again and a fuel depot near the Engels airbase.
Meanwhile the Russians hit nearly a dozen apartment blocks in Kyiv.
Pokrovsk is the sharp end of the "giving up land to buy time" strategy. In this time that the Ukrainians have kept the Russians out of Povrosk (and it is still significantly contested) the Ukrainians have done vast damage to the Russian economy. One town nobody had ever heard of before the war in exchange for smashing dozens of oil refineries, oil storage and loading facilities nobody ever heard of - but are integral to a functioning hydrocarbons exploitation that funds Putin's war.
This is true, and yet. Russia is also pushing forward around Kupiansk, and in Zaporizhia. This indicates that Russia is still able to bring a superiority of force to bear on the front line, in terms of men, equipment and firepower.
If Ukraine is going to turn the tide of the war they need to be able to reduce the firepower that Russia can deploy to the battlefield, to disrupt their ability to regenerate forces, while increasing their ability to do likewise.
The recent corruption case is damaging in this context. The existence of corruption in central government, and the likelihood that corruption exists elsewhere, but has not yet been uncovered, undermines the sense that Ukrainians have something worth fighting and dying for. I don't think Ukraine has another two or three years of slowly chipping away at Russia's ability to maintain the war. They need more help soon, so that they can win the war more quickly.
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
Should it be the case for ALL elected officials right down to Town and Parish councils that if you cease to be a member of the party for whom you were elected, you are forced to resign and a new election is called?
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
Like @isam I don't like a change of PM mid government (other than death or very serious illness) nor defections without by-elections.
They are rare however, and rarely work out well for the parties or individuals concerned, and this does seem to limit how often it happens.
We might look at 2010-24 and see the Conservatives had five Prime Ministers in that period - Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak but, to be fair, from 1951-64, they went through Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Hume so not unprecdented.
I think that changing the PM mid-government has only worked well twice for the Tories (MacMillan and Major) and never for Labour
I hope the news that Reeves is leaking she won't increase income tax does not mean she will be increasing national insurance instead.
NI is much worse than income tax, it is a tax only on those working for a living.
No, she is instead likely to lower the thresholds for higher rate and additional rate income tax and maybe even basic rate income tax so more pay at those bands and increase tax on expensive properties and raise tax on gamblers based on what the FT have said today
Yes and get even less money in the end, these people are thick as mince.
Maybe the Health and Social Care levy will return? That's not an increase in income tax is it ?!?
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Let's be clear, we're talking about rapists. Parsing the semantics to "tread a line" is morally repulsive.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
That's what Tony Blair was good at in the early years and he showed you could remain human and do it with charm. Still the best PM in my lifetime by a country mile.....
Kennedy was obviously flawed in many ways and no doubt employed good speechwriters, but he certainly recognised what made a good speech.
'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.'
If you were someone who believed in institutional racism, this question to Eberechi Eze would raise an eyebrow. I thought the commentary at the time seemed odd. He scores a worldie, but all the commentators focus on a five yard pass from the white guy
It is the statistification, for want of a better word and there probably is one, of football. In the old days, goals were all that mattered. Now, assists (or in this instance, Phil's pass) are counted on an almost equal basis.
How is an assist defined? If there is a twenty pass move ending in a low ball into the box and a finish from the striker shouldn't the whole team get the assist?
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
Should it be the case for ALL elected officials right down to Town and Parish councils that if you cease to be a member of the party for whom you were elected, you are forced to resign and a new election is called?
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
Like @isam I don't like a change of PM mid government (other than death or very serious illness) nor defections without by-elections.
They are rare however, and rarely work out well for the parties or individuals concerned, and this does seem to limit how often it happens.
We might look at 2010-24 and see the Conservatives had five Prime Ministers in that period - Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak but, to be fair, from 1951-64, they went through Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Hume so not unprecdented.
I think that changing the PM mid-government has only worked well twice for the Tories (MacMillan and Major) and never for Labour
Callaghan almost managed to pull it back before the Winter of Discontent.
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
Even then the LDs would likely win more seats than the Greens and Labour, as I already posted Davey has a higher favourability rating now with 2024 Labour voters than either Starmer or Polanski do
Yes. But that reduces the chances of Labour staging a recovery to win more seats than the Greens even further. One of the things helping the Tories to hang on is that the Lib Dems have foregone the opportunity to park their tanks on the centre-right, on a platform of fiscal responsibility and wet Toryism. But it means they are in the right vicinity to be part of a pincer attack on Labour. And that reduces the bar of seats that the Greens need to win to surpass Labour, if Labour don't have centrist votes to fall back on.
In two and a half minutes, Jimmy Carr tells an American audience why capitalism is better than communism, and the difference between socialist and woke. ETA nsfw language. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zMmjKRettxA
Brilliant. I’ve seen him live a couple of times, fantastic show and genuinely a nice guy. Don’t take your mother-in-law though, he’s a little ‘blue’.
I've seen him live dozens and dozens of times.
Pro tip, if you ever go see him live do not heckle or engage with him, he will rip the piss out of you, and if you're really lucky, you'll make it onto the edit of the TV show/DVD/Blu-ray.
On a similar subject, from last week's Popbitch.
Frank Skinner’s Manchester show went a tad awry this week when he did a routine about no longer being in the Top 10 list of most famous comedians.
He comforted himself by asking: “Well, who’s the most famous GP?” Cue gasps of horror from the audience, and someone shouting back “Harold Shipman killed my mother and father”, before spending the rest of the gig sobbing in her seat.
We’re not sure Frank handled the heckling very well. “Well, how was I supposed to know that?” he asked the crying woman. To which another audience member helpfully provided: “You’re in Manchester!”
A cautionary tale in reading the room - and perhaps editing your sets geographically.
I am aware of Harold Shipman. But I would not have been able to tell you where he worked.
'The wall belongs to Osborne's neighbour James Reed, the tycoon behind Reed Recruitment who has been critical of Labour's economic policies. 'I'm surprised that whichever of my neighbours he happened to be visiting didn't offer him a toilet. It doesn't seem very diplomatic,' Mr Reed told the Daily Mail.
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
Outside football grounds it is not uncommon to see signs warning of on-the-spot fines for this.
Is that a warning that is never actually enforced?
I’m sure it’s very much enforced outside football grounds, and very much ignored when it’s Lord Mandleson in Notting Hill.
A friend of mine once spent a night in the cells for the same offence. They let him go in the morning with a caution and a hangover.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
I'm old enough to remember when Slab won a by electon by, in part, by promising to end the 2-child cap. Admittedly that was before the last GE, but still ...
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
That's what Tony Blair was good at in the early years and he showed you could remain human and do it with charm. Still the best PM in my lifetime by a country mile.....
Kennedy was obviously flawed in many ways and no doubt employed good speechwriters, but he certainly recognised what made a good speech.
'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.'
The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .
The risk for Rachel Reeves with better than expected fiscal shortfall figures this year is that she backs off taking the necessary steps for sustainable finances and next year's figures go the other way. So she will go through the same revenue raising trauma again next year. She should just bite the bullet now.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
In 1997 the country was booming. The Tories were being evicted not because the economy was in the toilet but because everyone was thoroughly sick of them and rather fancied spending a bit of money on schools and hospitals, thanks. So sticking to the Tories economic plans was the right thing to do, and not really a ming vase.
In 2024 we needed a government to do 1979, not 1997.
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Also digging up arcane terminology. I haven't heard the expression 'paed****t' since I last read a book on everyday life in ancient Athens.
The more one reads about life in Athens, and classical Greece generally, the more it appears an utter horror show, of rape, child sexual abuse, infanticide, kinslaying, human trafficking etc.
Whilst debating deep philosophy. Always beware philosophers, for they can find a justification for anything.
Increasingly, I’m of the view that the Persians were the slightly better side.
Interesting question re the Spartans. How do they score against the Athenians on the social correctness marker? Definitely zero out of ten for gastronomy, though.
As for the Thebans, their crack heavy infantry regiment was based on, well not quite paederasty, but one wonders about the recruitment methodology.
In two and a half minutes, Jimmy Carr tells an American audience why capitalism is better than communism, and the difference between socialist and woke. ETA nsfw language. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zMmjKRettxA
Brilliant. I’ve seen him live a couple of times, fantastic show and genuinely a nice guy. Don’t take your mother-in-law though, he’s a little ‘blue’.
I've seen him live dozens and dozens of times.
Pro tip, if you ever go see him live do not heckle or engage with him, he will rip the piss out of you, and if you're really lucky, you'll make it onto the edit of the TV show/DVD/Blu-ray.
On a similar subject, from last week's Popbitch.
Frank Skinner’s Manchester show went a tad awry this week when he did a routine about no longer being in the Top 10 list of most famous comedians.
He comforted himself by asking: “Well, who’s the most famous GP?” Cue gasps of horror from the audience, and someone shouting back “Harold Shipman killed my mother and father”, before spending the rest of the gig sobbing in her seat.
We’re not sure Frank handled the heckling very well. “Well, how was I supposed to know that?” he asked the crying woman. To which another audience member helpfully provided: “You’re in Manchester!”
A cautionary tale in reading the room - and perhaps editing your sets geographically.
I am aware of Harold Shipman. But I would not have been able to tell you where he worked.
I don’t think it matters as family members could live anywhere.
Got to say the venue staff clearly hate Frank as otherwise they would have tried to quietly deal with the issue
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Also digging up arcane terminology. I haven't heard the expression 'paed****t' since I last read a book on everyday life in ancient Athens.
The more one reads about life in Athens, and classical Greece generally, the more it appears an utter horror show, of rape, child sexual abuse, infanticide, kinslaying, human trafficking etc.
Whilst debating deep philosophy. Always beware philosophers, for they can find a justification for anything.
Increasingly, I’m of the view that the Persians were the slightly better side.
P{S: also the way they treated women, or at least the 'respectable' family kind.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
I'm old enough to remember when Slab won a by electon by, in part, by promising to end the 2-child cap. Admittedly that was before the last GE, but still ...
You can’t commit to spending money when the books don’t balance.
Got to say the thing I think we are all picking up here is that Reeves isn’t good enough
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Football success on the pitch is linked to off the pitch too. Its why a side like Swindon will never win the Premier League. There aren't enough people in Swindon who want to watch them. Tickets and merch makes clubs money and that drives success.
Now the model has changed hugely in the last 30 years with Sky etc. And in the old times it was possible to build a side and move up the leagues, and indeed I did watch Swindon rise from the 4th Division inn 1986 all the way to the 1st division in 1990 (for 11 days before they were relegated for naughty financials) and then again in 1993. But I think those days are gone and the funding of football now is more likely linked to overseas billionaires.
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
Being into 14/15 year old girls seems normative in the US South.
If you were someone who believed in institutional racism, this question to Eberechi Eze would raise an eyebrow. I thought the commentary at the time seemed odd. He scores a worldie, but all the commentators focus on a five yard pass from the white guy
It is the statistification, for want of a better word and there probably is one, of football. In the old days, goals were all that mattered. Now, assists (or in this instance, Phil's pass) are counted on an almost equal basis.
How is an assist defined? If there is a twenty pass move ending in a low ball into the box and a finish from the striker shouldn't the whole team get the assist?
From actually sitting behind the goal, neither the pass or the gaol were incredible feats.
The whole game was rather low powered, to be honest.
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
Should it be the case for ALL elected officials right down to Town and Parish councils that if you cease to be a member of the party for whom you were elected, you are forced to resign and a new election is called?
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
Political parties should be banned entirely for Parish/Town Councils. They have no bearing on their job and it just encourages cliques that exclude other councillors. I had the distinction of being the only non Tory councillor on my Town Council and it was a miserable experience.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
I'm old enough to remember when Slab won a by electon by, in part, by promising to end the 2-child cap. Admittedly that was before the last GE, but still ...
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Also digging up arcane terminology. I haven't heard the expression 'paed****t' since I last read a book on everyday life in ancient Athens.
The more one reads about life in Athens, and classical Greece generally, the more it appears an utter horror show, of rape, child sexual abuse, infanticide, kinslaying, human trafficking etc.
Whilst debating deep philosophy. Always beware philosophers, for they can find a justification for anything.
Increasingly, I’m of the view that the Persians were the slightly better side.
P{S: also the way they treated women, or at least the 'respectable' family kind.
The Persians, of course, were indistinguishable, in their human rights record.
Obv. Ref. The modern version of this is the people who die in a ditch for the claim that American slavery was worse* than slavery in a range of other countries.
*their arguments are very similar to those that claim that American slavery was better than other kinds of slavery.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
That's what Tony Blair was good at in the early years and he showed you could remain human and do it with charm. Still the best PM in my lifetime by a country mile.....
Kennedy was obviously flawed in many ways and no doubt employed good speechwriters, but he certainly recognised what made a good speech.
'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.'
Disappointing news if it is confirmed Starmer and Reeves have backed away from income tax rises in the Budget.
The obvious conclusions from this are a) the onus will be more on spending cuts to try to reverse the deficit which will please many on here and b) it's very likely we'll be back here having the same discussion in twelve months when borrowing remaind stubbornly high.
Clearly, the argument tax rises would choke off any signs of returning business and consumer confidence has won the day and I get that but the idea now must be to try to slow the borrowing train and unless Reeves does something radical on property taxation (the signs aren't encouraging), it will be as much an admission economically the country is unmanageable since the economic decisions can't be taken for political reasons (though if your party is polling around or below 20%, there's another question).
@isam, who, it's fair to say, is no friend of Starmer, Reeves or the Labour Government, makes the compelling point big victories should allow incoming Governments to be radical but that's not the case, more often than not. The Attlee example isn't valid because of the unique circumstances of 1945 - Thatcher's Government saved its real radicalism for the second term and Blair did little or nothing with his 1997 landslide and any thoughts of radicalism in the second term were disrupted by events elsewhere.
You could perhaps argue Boris Johnson might have been a radical Prime Minister had it not been for the pandemic but talking radical and doing radical are very different things.
Counter intuitively, it's often Governments with small majorities, who know time isn't on their side, who are often the most radical and the most united.
Your last paragraph reinforces my belief that changing PM without a GE should be a much more difficult thing to do. If it wasn’t an option, parties would have to stick together and perhaps be encouraged to remember what they wanted to do with power.
Changing PM without a GE is a bit like defectors not holding a by election really. Don’t like it myself
Should it be the case for ALL elected officials right down to Town and Parish councils that if you cease to be a member of the party for whom you were elected, you are forced to resign and a new election is called?
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
Political parties should be banned entirely for Parish/Town Councils. They have no bearing on their job and it just encourages cliques that exclude other councillors. I had the distinction of being the only non Tory councillor on my Town Council and it was a miserable experience.
That is surely for the voters to decide? Most rural village Parish councillors are all independent anyway, in Town Councils round here Tory councillors often stood as LDs or Greens did and Reform are now also starting to stand at Town Council level to build a base
'The wall belongs to Osborne's neighbour James Reed, the tycoon behind Reed Recruitment who has been critical of Labour's economic policies. 'I'm surprised that whichever of my neighbours he happened to be visiting didn't offer him a toilet. It doesn't seem very diplomatic,' Mr Reed told the Daily Mail.
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
There is some talk of a seat-sharing deal between the Greens and Your Party, because they have largely different strong areas and no obvious deal-blocking policies. Depending how the Your Party conference goes, and resolution of the dispute with Zarah one way or another, it's possible to see this becoming quite significant. Like lots of leftish Labour supporters (I'm still CLP chair), I wouldn't dream of voting LibDem, as they lack a consistent left-wing approach - might as well carry on with Labour, in that case. I think that right-of-centre commenters on this thread don't really appreciate that and mistakenly imagine that the LibDems would be natural heirs to a further Labour slump.
It's also possible to imagine a failed, squabbling Your Party conference (the absence of any clear leadership is certainly a snag), a dismissal of Green leadership as fanciful, and a gradual Labour recovery. I think the next few months will provide som,e clarity.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
In 1997 the country was booming. The Tories were being evicted not because the economy was in the toilet but because everyone was thoroughly sick of them and rather fancied spending a bit of money on schools and hospitals, thanks. So sticking to the Tories economic plans was the right thing to do, and not really a ming vase.
In 2024 we needed a government to do 1979, not 1997.
Labour MPs won't even let Reeves make some minor welfare cuts let alone the spending cuts Thatcher and Howe did post 1979. Howe also cut the top rate of income tax even while making some tax rises elsewhere
'The wall belongs to Osborne's neighbour James Reed, the tycoon behind Reed Recruitment who has been critical of Labour's economic policies. 'I'm surprised that whichever of my neighbours he happened to be visiting didn't offer him a toilet. It doesn't seem very diplomatic,' Mr Reed told the Daily Mail.
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
Even then the LDs would likely win more seats than the Greens and Labour, as I already posted Davey has a higher favourability rating now with 2024 Labour voters than either Starmer or Polanski do
Yes. But that reduces the chances of Labour staging a recovery to win more seats than the Greens even further. One of the things helping the Tories to hang on is that the Lib Dems have foregone the opportunity to park their tanks on the centre-right, on a platform of fiscal responsibility and wet Toryism. But it means they are in the right vicinity to be part of a pincer attack on Labour. And that reduces the bar of seats that the Greens need to win to surpass Labour, if Labour don't have centrist votes to fall back on.
True but that just means Labour effectively becoming fifth, not even keeping 3rd. On your apocalyptic scenario for Starmer and Labour the LDs would take the centre left vote, the Greens the hard left vote, the Tories the centre right vote and Reform the nationalist right vote
Revealed: Lloyds Banking Group, Britain’s biggest high street lender, has signed an agreement to buy Curve, the digital wallet provider, after months of talks about a £120m deal which has sparked legal threats from some of the fintech’s major investors.
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
There is some talk of a seat-sharing deal between the Greens and Your Party, because they have largely different strong areas and no obvious deal-blocking policies. Depending how the Your Party conference goes, and resolution of the dispute with Zarah one way or another, it's possible to see this becoming quite significant. Like lots of leftish Labour supporters (I'm still CLP chair), I wouldn't dream of voting LibDem, as they lack a consistent left-wing approach - might as well carry on with Labour, in that case. I think that right-of-centre commenters on this thread don't really appreciate that and mistakenly imagine that the LibDems would be natural heirs to a further Labour slump.
It's also possible to imagine a failed, squabbling Your Party conference (the absence of any clear leadership is certainly a snag), a dismissal of Green leadership as fanciful, and a gradual Labour recovery. I think the next few months will provide som,e clarity.
As I posted earlier though most 2024 Labour voters prefer Davey to Polanski with Yougov even if you don't
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
That's what Tony Blair was good at in the early years and he showed you could remain human and do it with charm. Still the best PM in my lifetime by a country mile.....
Kennedy was obviously flawed in many ways and no doubt employed good speechwriters, but he certainly recognised what made a good speech.
'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.'
The amazing thing is that Americans got wholeheartedly behind the project, despite the cost.
Today there would be a bunch of moon deniers, and a whole load more who simply hated the idea because of who proposed it.
Actual polling at the time suggested the American people were lukewarm warm on the idea.
After Apollo 11 support dropped rapidly. Many people took the view "We beat the Soviets, why is this continuing?"
The reason that the later missions were cancelled was a combination of *NASA* pressure (the LEM in particular was very dangerous and they were terrified of losing a crew) and Congressional support fading.
'The wall belongs to Osborne's neighbour James Reed, the tycoon behind Reed Recruitment who has been critical of Labour's economic policies. 'I'm surprised that whichever of my neighbours he happened to be visiting didn't offer him a toilet. It doesn't seem very diplomatic,' Mr Reed told the Daily Mail.
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
Pee-er of the realm
Yet still keeps his title now unlike Andrew, despite acts like this and his Epstein links
I've heard some people argue that these drone flights are an attempt to distract Europeans from supporting Ukraine by making them worry about defending against drones at home. But I wonder whether Russia is preparing widescale drone attacks against European military targets as a first strike, that would massively cut the output of the European armaments industry.
'The wall belongs to Osborne's neighbour James Reed, the tycoon behind Reed Recruitment who has been critical of Labour's economic policies. 'I'm surprised that whichever of my neighbours he happened to be visiting didn't offer him a toilet. It doesn't seem very diplomatic,' Mr Reed told the Daily Mail.
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
I've heard some people argue that these drone flights are an attempt to distract Europeans from supporting Ukraine by making them worry about defending against drones at home. But I wonder whether Russia is preparing widescale drone attacks against European military targets as a first strike, that would massively cut the output of the European armaments industry.
If they did that, the response would be the kind of expansion in armaments production that would make Henry Kaiser sit up.
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
There is some talk of a seat-sharing deal between the Greens and Your Party, because they have largely different strong areas and no obvious deal-blocking policies. Depending how the Your Party conference goes, and resolution of the dispute with Zarah one way or another, it's possible to see this becoming quite significant. Like lots of leftish Labour supporters (I'm still CLP chair), I wouldn't dream of voting LibDem, as they lack a consistent left-wing approach - might as well carry on with Labour, in that case. I think that right-of-centre commenters on this thread don't really appreciate that and mistakenly imagine that the LibDems would be natural heirs to a further Labour slump.
It's also possible to imagine a failed, squabbling Your Party conference (the absence of any clear leadership is certainly a snag), a dismissal of Green leadership as fanciful, and a gradual Labour recovery. I think the next few months will provide som,e clarity.
Certainly the experience of Lib Dems supporting Cameron in the coalition would be a block for most left-wing Labour supporters to consider voting Lib Dem, but I think there are still plenty of centrist supporters of Labour.
I think there's a better chance of the Greens finishing ahead of Labour in terms of seats than the odds indicate.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
Even then the LDs would likely win more seats than the Greens and Labour, as I already posted Davey has a higher favourability rating now with 2024 Labour voters than either Starmer or Polanski do
Yes. But that reduces the chances of Labour staging a recovery to win more seats than the Greens even further. One of the things helping the Tories to hang on is that the Lib Dems have foregone the opportunity to park their tanks on the centre-right, on a platform of fiscal responsibility and wet Toryism. But it means they are in the right vicinity to be part of a pincer attack on Labour. And that reduces the bar of seats that the Greens need to win to surpass Labour, if Labour don't have centrist votes to fall back on.
True but that just means Labour effectively becoming fifth, not even keeping 3rd. On your apocalyptic scenario for Starmer and Labour the LDs would take the centre left vote, the Greens the hard left vote, the Tories the centre right vote and Reform the nationalist right vote
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Also digging up arcane terminology. I haven't heard the expression 'paed****t' since I last read a book on everyday life in ancient Athens.
The more one reads about life in Athens, and classical Greece generally, the more it appears an utter horror show, of rape, child sexual abuse, infanticide, kinslaying, human trafficking etc.
Whilst debating deep philosophy. Always beware philosophers, for they can find a justification for anything.
Increasingly, I’m of the view that the Persians were the slightly better side.
P{S: also the way they treated women, or at least the 'respectable' family kind.
The Persians, of course, were indistinguishable, in their human rights record.
Obv. Ref. The modern version of this is the people who die in a ditch for the claim that American slavery was worse* than slavery in a range of other countries.
*their arguments are very similar to those that claim that American slavery was better than other kinds of slavery.
We should just take for granted that for most chattel slaves, in any era, including our own, life is appalling. Hence, the high rates of suicide among slaves.
The GOP going into bat for the people in the Epstein files is one of the most shameless things I have ever seen. Just unforgivable.
Karoline Leavitt takes the time and effort to remove or hide her crucifix before defending peadophiles on live TV, so they are not unaware of their actions
Megyn Kelly in 2018: " There's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old."
Megyn Kelly today: "Jeffrey Epstein…was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old."
Good god, GOP shills are now resorting to "at least she wasn't eight".
Megyn Kelly: "I know somebody very close to this case…Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile…He was into the barely legal type, like he liked 15 year old girls…He wasn't into like 8 year olds…There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old." https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1989014083274952746
She’s trying really hard to tread the line between the Ben Shapiro / Charlie Kirk conservatives, and the Tucker Carlson / Candace Owens conservatives, with the latter group getting increasingly crazy and conspiracy theorist.
She is however correct that there’s a difference between paedophiles and pederasts, even though both are illegal and obviously wrong.
Ok, righties debating which levels of paedophilia are okayish is pretty funny. Perhaps an 'edgy' stage act can do a riff on it.
Also digging up arcane terminology. I haven't heard the expression 'paed****t' since I last read a book on everyday life in ancient Athens.
The more one reads about life in Athens, and classical Greece generally, the more it appears an utter horror show, of rape, child sexual abuse, infanticide, kinslaying, human trafficking etc.
Whilst debating deep philosophy. Always beware philosophers, for they can find a justification for anything.
Increasingly, I’m of the view that the Persians were the slightly better side.
P{S: also the way they treated women, or at least the 'respectable' family kind.
There’s a very good scene, in Alexander, where Angelina Jolie as Olympias, fixes her gaze on Philip II’s second wife, and her new-born baby. Jolie combines the face of an angel with the stare of a cobra. The second wife is terrified, with good reason. You just know what’s going through the minds of both women. In this world, they call infant murder Tuesday.
"Here’s an extraordinarily cynical take: did the government talk up the likelihood of a manifesto-breaking income tax rise in the knowledge that it would push down gilt yields in the window the OBR will use for its forecasts?"
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
That's what Tony Blair was good at in the early years and he showed you could remain human and do it with charm. Still the best PM in my lifetime by a country mile.....
Kennedy was obviously flawed in many ways and no doubt employed good speechwriters, but he certainly recognised what made a good speech.
'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.'
The amazing thing is that Americans got wholeheartedly behind the project, despite the cost.
Today there would be a bunch of moon deniers, and a whole load more who simply hated the idea because of who proposed it.
Actual polling at the time suggested the American people were lukewarm warm on the idea.
After Apollo 11 support dropped rapidly. Many people took the view "We beat the Soviets, why is this continuing?"
The reason that the later missions were cancelled was a combination of *NASA* pressure (the LEM in particular was very dangerous and they were terrified of losing a crew) and Congressional support fading.
The polling just after Kennedy’s assassination would have been massively in favour of defining his legacy.
After Apollo 11, there was less of an appetite to keep the programme running.
Jeffrey Epstein advised Steve Bannon that the lawyers representing Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing should accuse Christine Blasey Ford of being on medications that cause false memories or memory loss. https://x.com/snmrrw/status/1988741615444173178
Not only did the Ukrainians hit the oil terminal in Novorossiysk (the explosion there was massive), and air defences there, but they also hit the Saratov oil refinery again and a fuel depot near the Engels airbase.
Meanwhile the Russians hit nearly a dozen apartment blocks in Kyiv.
Pokrovsk is the sharp end of the "giving up land to buy time" strategy. In this time that the Ukrainians have kept the Russians out of Povrosk (and it is still significantly contested) the Ukrainians have done vast damage to the Russian economy. One town nobody had ever heard of before the war in exchange for smashing dozens of oil refineries, oil storage and loading facilities nobody ever heard of - but are integral to a functioning hydrocarbons exploitation that funds Putin's war.
This is true, and yet. Russia is also pushing forward around Kupiansk, and in Zaporizhia. This indicates that Russia is still able to bring a superiority of force to bear on the front line, in terms of men, equipment and firepower.
If Ukraine is going to turn the tide of the war they need to be able to reduce the firepower that Russia can deploy to the battlefield, to disrupt their ability to regenerate forces, while increasing their ability to do likewise.
The recent corruption case is damaging in this context. The existence of corruption in central government, and the likelihood that corruption exists elsewhere, but has not yet been uncovered, undermines the sense that Ukrainians have something worth fighting and dying for. I don't think Ukraine has another two or three years of slowly chipping away at Russia's ability to maintain the war. They need more help soon, so that they can win the war more quickly.
Ukraine has done a huge amount towards dismantling the Russian economy in three months. It is causing chaos behind the scenes in the Kremlin. This has been helped by our Storm Shadow missiles but mostly through the creation of a range of domestically made drones and missiles. (Ukraine was the workshop of weaponry in the USSR. They have the skills.) These missiles don't reqire any permission to be launched, going to targets of Ukraine's choosing.
They could do with some Tomahawks to destroy the Shaheed assembly factories, currently outside the range of their missiles. But oil refining, storage and transport west of the Urals is all at great risk. This is what pays for the ability to wage war. That money is being cut off.
Plus the Russian money held by sanctions - some $400bn - looks set to be freed up to maintain the economy of Ukraine and buy state of the art weaponry such as the Gripen E.
Time is not Russia's friend. They have likely already missed the best window for a settlement to retain the land they currently hold. Crimea is turning into a disaster, no longer of use as a safe warm-water port. It holds a large number of air defence systems that should be guarding refineries (at least, until they get destroyed in the very regular attacks within Crimea). Power, water and fuel there are intermittent. It doesn't hold the attraction it once did as a holiday destination. The need to secure it is largely down to Putin not losing face. But militarily it is a basket case, tying up huge numbers of troops who could have made a great impact on the eastern front.
Russia has no tanks left. It has very few IFVs. Its aircraft lob glide bombs in from distance. Even that option ends when Ukraine get long-range missiles (200km+) meshed into their systems. The navy just sits in ever more distant ports, waiting for the latest iteration of the sea drones to find them. All Russia has are huge numbers of bullet-catchers, sent to their doom by officers making money buying and selling them. Whatever Russia has been doing is not sustainable.
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair
I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case
Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.
I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.
That's what Tony Blair was good at in the early years and he showed you could remain human and do it with charm. Still the best PM in my lifetime by a country mile.....
Kennedy was obviously flawed in many ways and no doubt employed good speechwriters, but he certainly recognised what made a good speech.
'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.'
The amazing thing is that Americans got wholeheartedly behind the project, despite the cost.
Today there would be a bunch of moon deniers, and a whole load more who simply hated the idea because of who proposed it.
Actual polling at the time suggested the American people were lukewarm warm on the idea.
After Apollo 11 support dropped rapidly. Many people took the view "We beat the Soviets, why is this continuing?"
The reason that the later missions were cancelled was a combination of *NASA* pressure (the LEM in particular was very dangerous and they were terrified of losing a crew) and Congressional support fading.
The polling just after Kennedy’s assassination would have been massively in favour of defining his legacy.
After Apollo 11, there was less of an appetite to keep the programme running.
Apollo 13 was damn close to losing the crew.
But in fairness it inspired one of the best films of all time.
If you were someone who believed in institutional racism, this question to Eberechi Eze would raise an eyebrow. I thought the commentary at the time seemed odd. He scores a worldie, but all the commentators focus on a five yard pass from the white guy
Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.
Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.
Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved
I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue
All true, but two quibbles: 1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence. 2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this. When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year. I appreciate this is incidental to your point.
In 1997 the country was booming. The Tories were being evicted not because the economy was in the toilet but because everyone was thoroughly sick of them and rather fancied spending a bit of money on schools and hospitals, thanks. So sticking to the Tories economic plans was the right thing to do, and not really a ming vase.
In 2024 we needed a government to do 1979, not 1997.
Labour MPs won't even let Reeves make some minor welfare cuts let alone the spending cuts Thatcher and Howe did post 1979. Howe also cut the top rate of income tax even while making some tax rises elsewhere
Back before it became uniparty consensus that the bottom must benefit and the top must suffer at every budget. Built the wonderful world we live in where managerial roles pay pennies more than minimum wage and the whole country is rightly responding to the incentives and giving in.
Comments
The idea 16 is blanket age of consent is not quite right.
Either way though, 15 is not barely legal. It might be less harshly penalised, but it is still outright illegal.
The Auschwitz Watchtower joke, the bear-buggering joke, the sheep’s a bloody liar joke, and the paedophile joke.
If you ask the OBR at three different points of the year to estimate the fiscal hole, you might well get answers of 20, 40, 60bn. 20bn is close to a rounding error in our spending.
We need to stop making radically different plans based on their estimate which is another term for educated and calculated guess.
It is rather ridiculous that forecasts looking years ahead drive so many of these decisions. Its like the weather, completely innaccurate after a certain time.
Possible 1% more on employERS NI which would raise around £8bn pa
Sex with 15 year olds, especially trafficked 15 year olds, is a crime in most places.
When dial up internet was a thing, I spent 2 days downloading a film called ‘Bald and barely legal’, imagine my horror when it turned out to be a film about tyres.
One of the main impediments to the Greens has been the argument that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote, and I think we may discover just how much of Labour's vote is a vote against the Tories, rather than a vote for something. Were Labour to fall to fifth in the opinion polling, which is not that much of a stretch from their current position, then this argument would be turned on its head. A vote for Labour would be a wasted vote, and with precious little ideological attachment to the party in preference to either the Greens or the Lib Dems, we could see Labour's position deteriorate much further once past that tipping point. Then it's not hard to see the Greens win more seats than Labour.
Oddly enough, Labour really could do with Your Party having a reasonably successful launch, in order to split the left-of-Labour vote and avoid this scenario coming about.
Whilst debating deep philosophy. Always beware philosophers, for they can find a justification for anything.
Increasingly, I’m of the view that the Persians were the slightly better side.
15 is illegal in both UK and I think everywhere in US. Fine in France and Spain though.
My original point was that Megyn Kelly is correct that there’s a big difference between an attraction to teenagers, and an attraction to kids at the start of primary school. Both in language and in law.
My personal view is that the age of consent should be 18, a unified age of majority.
"Here’s an extraordinarily cynical take: did the government talk up the likelihood of a manifesto-breaking income tax rise in the knowledge that it would push down gilt yields in the window the OBR will use for its forecasts?"
https://x.com/BenZaranko/status/1989244828220031249
The tenant of a nearby flat added: 'We have to put up with this sort of revolting behaviour during the Notting Hill Carnival. It's a shame to see that people still feel entitled to urinate in the street here three months later, and quite outrageous that the person responsible should be a peer of the realm.'
Fortunately for Mandelson his latest indiscretion is unlikely to incur any criminal charges.
'Technically, it's against the law under a public order act of 1986, but it's very unlikely that someone who gets caught short would end up being prosecuted,' said Julian Lee, a criminal defence expert at Reed's Solicitors. 'The only exception would be if they had caused alarm or distress to another person, or caused criminal damage, or were also doing something of a sexual nature. I very much doubt those factors apply in this case.'
There's nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, stopping the former councillor/MP from standing under their new colours in any subsequent by-election (I wouldn't go as far as to disqualify them) but, as you say, it would encourage internal party discipline and that should or was in my day at any rate a key part of the political process.
My only thought is, if a PM dies in office, are we saying there would have to be a General Election or simply a by-election in their seat?
There are two alternatives. Establish fiscal responsibility by cutting the budget deficit in reality, rather than on paper, in the future. Or re-establish the safety margin in the plans, so that fluctuations in the forecast can be ignored. Both of these alternatives involve making more spending cuts, or tax increases, than the status quo.
That's why we are where we are.
EDIT: If we simply decide to ignore the OBR, then Britain loses its fiscal credibility and is forced into cutting the budget deficit rather quickly.
They are rare however, and rarely work out well for the parties or individuals concerned, and this does seem to limit how often it happens.
That the employer is paying more tax on hiring workers feeds through to lower wages and less employment. It is a tax on people working for a living.
Is that a warning that is never actually enforced?
And it will have to keep pointing this out because our underlying fiscal situation is deteriorating, not improving. We have absolutely minimal growth, a very large deficit, a serious increase in the cost of our debt mountain (not entirely sure I mountain quite covers it anymore) and pressure on the defence budget. Even worse we have a government that refuses to recognise all of this and who will try to find spending cuts to even offset these pressures.
Imagine the conversations between Megyn and her 14 year old daughter about sex with middle aged men
Until someone from the Trump regime had a quiet word.
This cabal are getting horribly tied in knots. Their previous support for release is all on record. There is no reason for them to have done a 180. Other than "Oh shit....."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_the_United_States
There's a big weight on age gap, and for "unrestricted" age gaps NY is 17, New Jersey 18, Florida is 18.
I'm not sure about worldwide jurisdiction wrt to the aircraft (as we have here in measure). Looking at commentary I have seen, I'm not seeing an awareness yet of related trafficking offences - and how eg a man could potentially be complicit in trafficking for offences related to massages. Similarly for conspiracy.
This will continue for weeks.
One to watch imo is people who became eg US Ambassadors, as they have a "rich political buddy or donor reward" practice for much of that.
Our fiscal hole is the entire budget deficit. That was £137 bn at last reckoning.
The problem is trying to live on the edge of a maxed out credit card leaves no room for manoeuvre.
Talk of £20 billion black holes when our deficit is nearly 7 times that amount is the reason we are in that mess.
If Ukraine is going to turn the tide of the war they need to be able to reduce the firepower that Russia can deploy to the battlefield, to disrupt their ability to regenerate forces, while increasing their ability to do likewise.
The recent corruption case is damaging in this context. The existence of corruption in central government, and the likelihood that corruption exists elsewhere, but has not yet been uncovered, undermines the sense that Ukrainians have something worth fighting and dying for. I don't think Ukraine has another two or three years of slowly chipping away at Russia's ability to maintain the war. They need more help soon, so that they can win the war more quickly.
Parsing the semantics to "tread a line" is morally repulsive.
And calling it "barely legal" worse.
'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
A friend of mine once spent a night in the cells for the same offence. They let him go in the morning with a caution and a hangover.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15289831/Lord-Mandelson-caught-relieving-garden-wall-visit-George-Osborne-Notting-Hill.html
In 2024 we needed a government to do 1979, not 1997.
As for the Thebans, their crack heavy infantry regiment was based on, well not quite paederasty, but one wonders about the recruitment methodology.
Got to say the venue staff clearly hate Frank as otherwise they would have tried to quietly deal with the issue
Got to say the thing I think we are all picking up here is that Reeves isn’t good enough
Now the model has changed hugely in the last 30 years with Sky etc. And in the old times it was possible to build a side and move up the leagues, and indeed I did watch Swindon rise from the 4th Division inn 1986 all the way to the 1st division in 1990 (for 11 days before they were relegated for naughty financials) and then again in 1993. But I think those days are gone and the funding of football now is more likely linked to overseas billionaires.
The whole game was rather low powered, to be honest.
The Labour 2 Child Cap is completely different.
Obv. Ref. The modern version of this is the people who die in a ditch for the claim that American slavery was worse* than slavery in a range of other countries.
*their arguments are very similar to those that claim that American slavery was better than other kinds of slavery.
Today there would be a bunch of moon deniers, and a whole load more who simply hated the idea because of who proposed it.
It's also possible to imagine a failed, squabbling Your Party conference (the absence of any clear leadership is certainly a snag), a dismissal of Green leadership as fanciful, and a gradual Labour recovery. I think the next few months will provide som,e clarity.
Revealed: Lloyds Banking Group, Britain’s biggest high street lender, has signed an agreement to buy Curve, the digital wallet provider, after months of talks about a £120m deal which has sparked legal threats from some of the fintech’s major investors.
https://x.com/MarkKleinmanSky/status/1989270273875673452?s=20
After Apollo 11 support dropped rapidly. Many people took the view "We beat the Soviets, why is this continuing?"
The reason that the later missions were cancelled was a combination of *NASA* pressure (the LEM in particular was very dangerous and they were terrified of losing a crew) and Congressional support fading.
I've heard some people argue that these drone flights are an attempt to distract Europeans from supporting Ukraine by making them worry about defending against drones at home. But I wonder whether Russia is preparing widescale drone attacks against European military targets as a first strike, that would massively cut the output of the European armaments industry.
There isn't a pit of hell low enough for these people.
After Apollo 11, there was less of an appetite to keep the programme running.
Apollo 13 was damn close to losing the crew.
https://x.com/snmrrw/status/1988741615444173178
They could do with some Tomahawks to destroy the Shaheed assembly factories, currently outside the range of their missiles. But oil refining, storage and transport west of the Urals is all at great risk. This is what pays for the ability to wage war. That money is being cut off.
Plus the Russian money held by sanctions - some $400bn - looks set to be freed up to maintain the economy of Ukraine and buy state of the art weaponry such as the Gripen E.
Time is not Russia's friend. They have likely already missed the best window for a settlement to retain the land they currently hold. Crimea is turning into a disaster, no longer of use as a safe warm-water port. It holds a large number of air defence systems that should be guarding refineries (at least, until they get destroyed in the very regular attacks within Crimea). Power, water and fuel there are intermittent. It doesn't hold the attraction it once did as a holiday destination. The need to secure it is largely down to Putin not losing face. But militarily it is a basket case, tying up huge numbers of troops who could have made a great impact on the eastern front.
Russia has no tanks left. It has very few IFVs. Its aircraft lob glide bombs in from distance. Even that option ends when Ukraine get long-range missiles (200km+) meshed into their systems. The navy just sits in ever more distant ports, waiting for the latest iteration of the sea drones to find them. All Russia has are huge numbers of bullet-catchers, sent to their doom by officers making money buying and selling them. Whatever Russia has been doing is not sustainable.
Eze's cousin is a comedienne and performed on Saturday Night Live. That seems more interesting