Judge Salas was assigned 4 days ago to unravel all of the money laundering in the Epstein case. Hundred of millions worth with banks, suspects, whole black book. Yesterday a gunman shows up at her house, shoots her husband, kills her son, and escapes without going into house. https://x.com/TimJDillon/status/128506274635503206
That's a really bad development.
Oh. I see from other posts that it's very old news and had a personal, not political, motive.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
It is the changes the Tories subsequently made, once they had their majority, that were the most egregious
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor then Osborne.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
Kemi is indeed doing well.
I hope she continues to do so. I wasn't hugely enthusiastic when she was elected, but I was clearly wrong. There's a real chance that she could pull the whole shambles of the Tory party back together again, and reinstate the truism of the party of government.
Possible but I wouldn't hold your breath. Apart from not being Farage i can't see very much for non Tory diehards to get excited about.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
You approve of her 'pedo defenders' rhetoric do you?
Apparently she was quoting a Times report that female labour mps had told Starmer that the public had said that to them
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Perfect test in my neck of the woods 9 Rural Suffolk CC green seats and 3 City Norfolk CC green seats plus a number on Norwich City Council Are up. How will they fare in each?
I expect them to hold most but struggle more in the former with vote share
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
I agree with so many of your posts and this is no exception
She has improved and is easy to listen to so much so my wife is charmed by her
The conservative party were rightly decimated in 2024, but largely due to Starmer's failures and poor governance resulting in the rise of extreme right and left parties, there will be space for Kemi not least because I expect Reform to implode
She has already announced she will scrap stamp duty on house sales, re-instate the 2 child cap, review all aspects of the economy and most recently address student loans
Apparently she has more announcements for young people and for me this is a welcome change from pandering to pensioners
I hope in time she will address the triple lock, but I am sure she knows she has a long hard road to walk down to GE29
I am supportive as we need a functioning consevative party as an antidote to the obnxious Farage and his party
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
Rural and market town England can be a weird place. In my constituency the LDs have not been in second place since 2010, and finished a distant fourth in 2024, with Labour in second getting within 3500 votes in a seat which has been Tory for over a hundred years.
And yet in May 2025 Labour only stood in half the seats of the county (through choice or lack of options) and were getting around 5-6%, with the LDs on 5x that.
Ok, Labour will have dropped in popularity just between 2024 and 2025, plus the LDs have the local pedigree, but though Labour did better in the 2021 locals in the area they still were only getting around 12-13%, despite the parliamentaries showing there's a lot of people who would like to vote for them.
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Sure but its local elections.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
This is all true and fair, but although it is a marathon and not a sprint, she doesn't have the luxury of knowing she will be allowed to finish the race - if her improved performance does not lead to her closing the gap with the leaders, she'll be taken to one side and told to just stop jogging.
Met Police have apologised to Sir Lindsay Hoyle for inadvertently revealing information during an investigation into allegations of misconduct in public office
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
Kemi is indeed doing well.
I hope she continues to do so. I wasn't hugely enthusiastic when she was elected, but I was clearly wrong. There's a real chance that she could pull the whole shambles of the Tory party back together again, and reinstate the truism of the party of government.
Possible but I wouldn't hold your breath. Apart from not being Farage i can't see very much for non Tory diehards to get excited about.
It's when the vaguely Tory get excited that it becomes interesting.
There really are some indications that she's a keeper.
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
The '50% to university' strategy was a very pre internet idea.
It didn't work in the internet era and its going to be a disaster in the AI era.
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Sure but its local elections.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
Well, lets see. I anticipate quite good numbers of gains for both Greens and LDs in both rural and urban areas. A bloodbath for Tories and Labour too.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Sure but its local elections.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
Well, lets see. I anticipate quite good numbers of gains for both Greens and LDs in both rural and urban areas. A bloodbath for Tories and Labour too.
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Sure but its local elections.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
Too boring, the choice of milquetoast centrist dads and Labour supporters born in a rural area. Today's voters want anger and simple answers (more exciting ones than the simple answers the LDs peddle that is), and a sense of freshness that Green and Reform offer despite being around in certain forms for a long time.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
This is all true and fair, but although it is a marathon and not a sprint, she doesn't have the luxury of knowing she will be allowed to finish the race - if her improved performance does not lead to her closing the gap with the leaders, she'll be taken to one side and told to just stop jogging.
I think Badenoch has done well by shedding her more toxic colleagues to Reform, and should survive even a dire set of May elections. She should last the year, and perhaps even to the GE and do well enough to be allowed 2 questions at PMQ's after that.
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Sure but its local elections.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
Well, lets see. I anticipate quite good numbers of gains for both Greens and LDs in both rural and urban areas. A bloodbath for Tories and Labour too.
Gains from protest votes are easy.
Keeping them once in government is the hard bit.
A problem for another day, the best kind of problem for a politician.
What is harder to tell is whether Reform/Greens of today realise it will get harder once they are in power, or will be befuddled about it happening to them. I think some know, others do not.
Not that it's impossible for them to succeed once they are in, that no real change is manageable, but some things are just inherently resistant to populist rhetoric.
Good. There are too many of them and it’s creating too many debt slaves.
Let the weaker ones close.
It’s going to be carnage, tho
I can see 50-80% of universities closing. Just shutting down. They will disguise the pain as “merging” but it’s inevitable
1. Degrees are hideously expensive 2. Grade inflation has made many valueless 3. The foreign student Ponzi scheme is ending 4. There are no jobs at the end any more 5. The teaching can nearly all be done for free remotely, online 6. Students are getting stupider like everyone else so what’s the point
That’s just six enormous problems.
Within a decade higher education will be a howling wasteland
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Sure but its local elections.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
'So for those who are too posh to vote Reform' such voters will still be voting LD, it is voters who want to cast a protest vote for a left of Labour Party now Labour are in government who will vote Green. Such voters would have voted for Charles Kennedy's LDs but certainly aren't voting for ex Tory LD coalition government minister Sir Ed Davey's LDs
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Labour and the Lib Dem simpletons need to see the greens for what they are. Not cost fluffy frenemies that are environmentalists but hard left, ruthless, Corbynistas.
If they don’t they’ll get battered by them.
Indeed. They are not the Ramsay/Chowns Ecology Party types any more. Which does mean they might disintegrate in Waveney and Herefordshire just as they storm the cities
I bumped into a Corbynista trade unionist the other day who stood as Labour Parliamentary candidate in a staunchly blue shire constituency near me, winning 26% of the vote, up from 17% in the 2015 GE in the same constituency.
There's quite a substantial far left vote in rural and market town England, and with the swing to Greens, I expect them to hold Waveney and Herefordshire quite comfortably.
There's certainly people suffering from deprivation and inequality in rural and market town England which could support leftist economic policies.
How many such potential voters care about Gaza is doubtful.
Meanwhile many of the affluent nimbys who have voted Green previously in rural areas are unlikely to be impressed with leftist economic policies.
Well, lets see. There are elections coming up all over England.
Sure but its local elections.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
Well, lets see. I anticipate quite good numbers of gains for both Greens and LDs in both rural and urban areas. A bloodbath for Tories and Labour too.
Gains from protest votes are easy.
Keeping them once in government is the hard bit.
I don't think anyone is forecasting a Green government, so it should not be too hard to hold on to them for the forseeable future.
Just last week they polled ahead of both Labour and Tories.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
I agree with so many of your posts and this is no exception
She has improved and is easy to listen to so much so my wife is charmed by her
The conservative party were rightly decimated in 2024, but largely due to Starmer's failures and poor governance resulting in the rise of extreme right and left parties, there will be space for Kemi not least because I expect Reform to implode
She has already announced she will scrap stamp duty on house sales, re-instate the 2 child cap, review all aspects of the economy and most recently address student loans
Apparently she has more announcements for young people and for me this is a welcome change from pandering to pensioners
I hope in time she will address the triple lock, but I am sure she knows she has a long hard road to walk down to GE29
I am supportive as we need a functioning consevative party as an antidote to the obnxious Farage and his party
The problem I have with her currently is she's playing the game of offering all kinds of nice things - stamp duty, the two child cap and now student loans but we are running a budget deficit of £120-140 billion and I don't yet see how she plans to reduce that as presumably she will seek to reduce taxation so it looks as though public spending will be in for the pain and she will need to explain to those who see their services reduced and their benefits cut why they should need to suffer in order others who frankly have plenty of wealth by comparison see their taxes reduced.
Indeed, I see her as only slightly different to the ex-Corbynite who is running to lead Newham Council on the platform of freezing Council Tax and restoring free parking for the first car in any household.
Yes, people will like it and vote for it but it's fiscally irresponsible and politically dishonest.
I'd have more respect for her if she were honest with the electorate and she accepted some of the things the Government in which she served as a Cabinet Minister weren't the best policies or at the very least admitted they didn't work as planned. Trying to airbrush the 2010-24 (and especially the 2019-24) administrations isn't a good look.
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
The '50% to university' strategy was a very pre internet idea.
It didn't work in the internet era and its going to be a disaster in the AI era.
Indeed, for most if you are not in the top 10% academically and don't need a degree to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher etc then you are better off starting your own small business in the age of AI or getting an apprenticeship with a firm with a job offer on completion
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
It looked misconceived at the time, and somewhat contrary to the other message being advanced a lot during my schooling in the 90s that ther are different types of intelligence and ability, and book learning was not for everyone and didn't mean people should not be afforded respect and opportunity.
The eternal cri du jambon, why can't the Greens go back to a single issue party polling on a single digit number with a single MP, and having virtually no effect on that issue. Leave the important stuff to the grown up parties with their distinguished record of not fucking that stuff up.
I'd say the most expensive energy in the world is a fairly profound effect.
Good. There are too many of them and it’s creating too many debt slaves.
Let the weaker ones close.
It’s going to be carnage, tho
I can see 50-80% of universities closing. Just shutting down. They will disguise the pain as “merging” but it’s inevitable
1. Degrees are hideously expensive 2. Grade inflation has made many valueless 3. The foreign student Ponzi scheme is ending 4. There are no jobs at the end any more 5. The teaching can nearly all be done for free remotely, online 6. Students are getting stupider like everyone else so what’s the point
That’s just six enormous problems.
Within a decade higher education will be a howling wasteland
Your conversations with your daughter must be a laugh. What does she think of the course so far?
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
Good. There are too many of them and it’s creating too many debt slaves.
Let the weaker ones close.
It’s going to be carnage, tho
I can see 50-80% of universities closing. Just shutting down. They will disguise the pain as “merging” but it’s inevitable
1. Degrees are hideously expensive 2. Grade inflation has made many valueless 3. The foreign student Ponzi scheme is ending 4. There are no jobs at the end any more 5. The teaching can nearly all be done for free remotely, online 6. Students are getting stupider like everyone else so what’s the point
That’s just six enormous problems.
Within a decade higher education will be a howling wasteland
British Unis are dually an education and a growing-up thing. The more highly regarded of them actually leave their students almost infinite space to just work themselves out. They get the best students and the space is worth most to them.
The great Lobachesky had nothing to do with me being the great mathematician that I am today. (I'm not, but mainly because I didn't ever get a copy of the proper phone directories)
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
It looked misconceived at the time, and somewhat contrary to the other message being advanced a lot during my schooling in the 90s that ther are different types of intelligence and ability, and book learning was not for everyone and didn't mean people should not be afforded respect and opportunity.
Since then schools have gone down the there is one type of learning route. And it is academic and based around the acquisition of facts to enable you to pass exams. All the crafty, arty, sporty, technical, imaginative and creative stuff is a complete waste of time and can't fit in what with the vital need for knowledge of dangling modifiers, Roman numerals and Harold Hadrada which Michael Gove and his merry band of rigorous Tory think tanks deemed essential for a modern economy.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
Things like the introduction of the OBR (whose forecasts are slightly less good than reading tea leaves) form a very poisonous legacy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
I agree with so many of your posts and this is no exception
She has improved and is easy to listen to so much so my wife is charmed by her
The conservative party were rightly decimated in 2024, but largely due to Starmer's failures and poor governance resulting in the rise of extreme right and left parties, there will be space for Kemi not least because I expect Reform to implode
She has already announced she will scrap stamp duty on house sales, re-instate the 2 child cap, review all aspects of the economy and most recently address student loans
Apparently she has more announcements for young people and for me this is a welcome change from pandering to pensioners
I hope in time she will address the triple lock, but I am sure she knows she has a long hard road to walk down to GE29
I am supportive as we need a functioning consevative party as an antidote to the obnxious Farage and his party
The problem I have with her currently is she's playing the game of offering all kinds of nice things - stamp duty, the two child cap and now student loans but we are running a budget deficit of £120-140 billion and I don't yet see how she plans to reduce that as presumably she will seek to reduce taxation so it looks as though public spending will be in for the pain and she will need to explain to those who see their services reduced and their benefits cut why they should need to suffer in order others who frankly have plenty of wealth by comparison see their taxes reduced.
Indeed, I see her as only slightly different to the ex-Corbynite who is running to lead Newham Council on the platform of freezing Council Tax and restoring free parking for the first car in any household.
Yes, people will like it and vote for it but it's fiscally irresponsible and politically dishonest.
I'd have more respect for her if she were honest with the electorate and she accepted some of the things the Government in which she served as a Cabinet Minister weren't the best policies or at the very least admitted they didn't work as planned. Trying to airbrush the 2010-24 (and especially the 2019-24) administrations isn't a good look.
It's a hard path to try to take. If Reform did not exist as an existential threat to the party maybe they'd have considered that kind of bluntly honest approach (though I doubt it, it seems to take at least two big losses for a party to learn a lesson), but as it is the public would hate it and they don't have the time to sit it out for years on low popularity knowing they will be back later as a challenger through cyclical trends.
So the easy path is taken - nothing good will be lost, reductions will only be in vague terms, people will pay less and get more, what's not to like?
Good. There are too many of them and it’s creating too many debt slaves.
Let the weaker ones close.
It’s going to be carnage, tho
I can see 50-80% of universities closing. Just shutting down. They will disguise the pain as “merging” but it’s inevitable
1. Degrees are hideously expensive 2. Grade inflation has made many valueless 3. The foreign student Ponzi scheme is ending 4. There are no jobs at the end any more 5. The teaching can nearly all be done for free remotely, online 6. Students are getting stupider like everyone else so what’s the point
That’s just six enormous problems.
Within a decade higher education will be a howling wasteland
Your conversations with your daughter must be a laugh. What does she think of the course so far?
I have two. The older at St Andrews, the younger taking a gap year to work out if uni even makes sense any more
I have tried to advise them: “no one can predict the future now, it’s so volatile. If you want to study, study what you love. No job is safe”
The older is really enjoying her time at St Andrews but she says all her friends talk with dread of the job desert when they graduate. It’s happening, it’s real, unis are doomed
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
I agree with so many of your posts and this is no exception
She has improved and is easy to listen to so much so my wife is charmed by her
The conservative party were rightly decimated in 2024, but largely due to Starmer's failures and poor governance resulting in the rise of extreme right and left parties, there will be space for Kemi not least because I expect Reform to implode
She has already announced she will scrap stamp duty on house sales, re-instate the 2 child cap, review all aspects of the economy and most recently address student loans
Apparently she has more announcements for young people and for me this is a welcome change from pandering to pensioners
I hope in time she will address the triple lock, but I am sure she knows she has a long hard road to walk down to GE29
I am supportive as we need a functioning consevative party as an antidote to the obnxious Farage and his party
The problem I have with her currently is she's playing the game of offering all kinds of nice things - stamp duty, the two child cap and now student loans but we are running a budget deficit of £120-140 billion and I don't yet see how she plans to reduce that as presumably she will seek to reduce taxation so it looks as though public spending will be in for the pain and she will need to explain to those who see their services reduced and their benefits cut why they should need to suffer in order others who frankly have plenty of wealth by comparison see their taxes reduced.
Indeed, I see her as only slightly different to the ex-Corbynite who is running to lead Newham Council on the platform of freezing Council Tax and restoring free parking for the first car in any household.
Yes, people will like it and vote for it but it's fiscally irresponsible and politically dishonest.
I'd have more respect for her if she were honest with the electorate and she accepted some of the things the Government in which she served as a Cabinet Minister weren't the best policies or at the very least admitted they didn't work as planned. Trying to airbrush the 2010-24 (and especially the 2019-24) administrations isn't a good look.
She has accepted the previous government got some things wrong, but she is greatly helped by the defections and is now looking at all areas of policy
The 2 child cap saves money but we need completely new thinking and I believe she understands that
What I do believe is the country need to comprehensively reject the policies being put forward by Reform and the Greens
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
It looked misconceived at the time, and somewhat contrary to the other message being advanced a lot during my schooling in the 90s that ther are different types of intelligence and ability, and book learning was not for everyone and didn't mean people should not be afforded respect and opportunity.
Since then schools have gone down the there is one type of learning route. And it is academic and based around the acquisition of facts to enable you to pass exams. All the crafty, arty, sporty, technical, imaginative and creative stuff is a complete waste of time and won't fit in amongst the vital knowledge of dangling modifiers, Roman numerals and Harold Hadrada which the Tories deemed essential for a modern economy.
Partly thanks to Gove, partly because all that book learning is way cheaper to deliver.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
Things like the introduction of the OBR (whose forecasts are slightly less good than reading tea leaves) form a very poisonous legacy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Good. There are too many of them and it’s creating too many debt slaves.
Let the weaker ones close.
It’s going to be carnage, tho
I can see 50-80% of universities closing. Just shutting down. They will disguise the pain as “merging” but it’s inevitable
1. Degrees are hideously expensive 2. Grade inflation has made many valueless 3. The foreign student Ponzi scheme is ending 4. There are no jobs at the end any more 5. The teaching can nearly all be done for free remotely, online 6. Students are getting stupider like everyone else so what’s the point
That’s just six enormous problems.
Within a decade higher education will be a howling wasteland
Your conversations with your daughter must be a laugh. What does she think of the course so far?
I have two. The older at St Andrews, the younger taking a gap year to work out if uni even makes sense any more
I have tried to advise them: “no one can predict the future now, it’s so volatile. If you want to study, study what you love. No job is safe”
The older is really enjoying her time at St Andrews but she says all her friends talk with dread of the job desert when they graduate. It’s happening, it’s real, unis are doomed
Even if that were to prove a pessimistic view, the fact that it is a real worry for so many people about to graduate (and a worry that has a basis), demonstrates that it is not without foundation.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
Things like the introduction of the OBR (whose forecasts are slightly less good than reading tea leaves) form a very poisonous legacy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
Osborne was a near-perfect Chancellor.
I read it on PB, so it must be true.
Well, at least he got along with his Prime Minister, which is better than a lot of Chancellors, though not enough on its own.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
50 years ago you did not need a degree to become a nurse, you trained on the job
50 years ago you didn't have the technology, responsibility and complexity of medical knowledge you do today. 50 years ago being a nurse was more similar to working in a care home today than working as a nurse today.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
Things like the introduction of the OBR (whose forecasts are slightly less good than reading tea leaves) form a very poisonous legacy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
I have it on good authority Osborne secretly favoured EMU.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
Things like the introduction of the OBR (whose forecasts are slightly less good than reading tea leaves) form a very poisonous legacy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
Osborne was a near-perfect Chancellor.
I read it on PB, so it must be true.
The near wipe-out for the Tories has been to a great extent that they failed to find a person of any sense to run the economy.
Osborne was awful, and (to my mind) car crashed a really very good PM in Cameron (although he car crashed himself later)
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
It looked misconceived at the time, and somewhat contrary to the other message being advanced a lot during my schooling in the 90s that ther are different types of intelligence and ability, and book learning was not for everyone and didn't mean people should not be afforded respect and opportunity.
Since then schools have gone down the there is one type of learning route. And it is academic and based around the acquisition of facts to enable you to pass exams. All the crafty, arty, sporty, technical, imaginative and creative stuff is a complete waste of time and won't fit in amongst the vital knowledge of dangling modifiers, Roman numerals and Harold Hadrada which the Tories deemed essential for a modern economy.
Partly thanks to Gove, partly because all that book learning is way cheaper to deliver.
Yeah. I'd edited my original comment because I didn't believe not naming the guilty parties was wrong. That the Tories still maintain the Gove reforms were a shining success says a lot. They only disown what they did when the system collapses. Then blame others
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Anecdata from a rather depressing conversation my wife had with two university friends the other day: Child a - always top of her class through school (admittedly at small town Catholic schools) with good degree in geography from Durham, followed (because no jobs) by a pointless masters in online communities and their norms* - now back home and without success in applying for jobs in the last six months. Is applying for TA jobs. Child b - always top of her class through school (admittedly at quite rough schools) - went to Newcastle University to study sociology** - has drifted from temp job to temp job for the last two years. Child c - always bright at school - is at Loughborough studying computing and suffering from depression at the pointlessness of it all - neither going to lectures nor having a social life, but not doing quite badly enough to get thrown out and paralysed by indecision. Child d - who is a genuine genius - just started in maths at Lancaster, following a switch from Manchester two weeks in whuch turned out not to be the experience he hoped - doing ok but not really flourishing (he will, I'm sure, fund a role, because he is a genuine genius. Should have been at Cambridge but fickle interview process.) Stepchild e - six months into degree at Newcastle Uni, but disillusionment and ennui has set in - wants to drop out but her actual mother won't let her. Stepchild f - only 16 but doesn't want to go to uni. Wants to be a chef.
The eternal cri du jambon, why can't the Greens go back to a single issue party polling on a single digit number with a single MP, and having virtually no effect on that issue. Leave the important stuff to the grown up parties with their distinguished record of not fucking that stuff up.
I'd say the most expensive energy in the world is a fairly profound effect.
Fundamentally, economies grow by either making better use of existing resources or acquiring more resources.
Energy efficiency plays into the former, and demographics into the latter - and we've stalled on both.
Countering that is AI, which could drive growth, but we've got a fanatic in charge of energy who sees the demands of data centres primarily as a threat to him achieving Net Zero.
Hoyle will have been Speaker for 10 years come the next election, with 30+ years as an MP under his belt - surely time to start thinking about successors.
That Bercow chap could come back as an MP, given he was never given a peerage.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
Things like the introduction of the OBR (whose forecasts are slightly less good than reading tea leaves) form a very poisonous legacy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
I have it on good authority Osborne secretly favoured EMU.
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Job applications are one of the things that's been utterly stuffed by A... electronic generation of text. Because anyone can now fire off hundreds of applications, the system is largely gummed up and firms can't get the number of candidates down to a small enough number that they can meaningfully process them.
“On paper, Ollie Kettle appears to be the ideal candidate for a competitive work experience placement.
The 21-year-old achieved straight A grades at A-level and is predicted to graduate with a first-class degree in biology from the University of Bath this summer.
But last year, at the end of his second year of university, he applied for more than 120 summer internships in banking and finance – and did not secure a single one.
Ollie heard back from fewer than 5pc of the roles he applied for, leaving him with three interviews that all eventually turned into rejections.”
STEM, Uni of Bath. First class degree. No job. £50,000 in debt
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Job applications are one of the things that's been utterly stuffed by A... electronic generation of text. Because anyone can now fire off hundreds of applications, the system is largely gummed up and firms can't get the number of candidates down to a small enough number that they can meaningfully process them.
I reject outright any Chatgpt written applications. You can tell. Don't do it kids.
The eternal cri du jambon, why can't the Greens go back to a single issue party polling on a single digit number with a single MP, and having virtually no effect on that issue. Leave the important stuff to the grown up parties with their distinguished record of not fucking that stuff up.
I'd say the most expensive energy in the world is a fairly profound effect.
Fundamentally, economies grow by either making better use of existing resources or acquiring more resources.
Energy efficiency plays into the former, and demographics into the latter - and we've stalled on both.
Countering that is AI, which could drive growth, but we've got a fanatic in charge of energy who sees the demands of data centres primarily as a threat to him achieving Net Zero.
I'm bearish on the more outlandish AI claims, but at times the singular focus on net zero does feel like priotising arbitrary homework targets over beneficial energy options.
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Hoyle will have been Speaker for 10 years come the next election, with 30+ years as an MP under his belt - surely time to start thinking about successors.
That Bercow chap could come back as an MP, given he was never given a peerage.
That astonishes me. I would have said less than three, OTTOMH. Not the best speaker of my lifetime but better than his two predecessors by a country mile.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
There's certainly talk of reorientating towards the colleges - which have always been the Cinderella of the system, compared to unis and schools. Obvs we need toppo research unis, and ones that can bring in the money via foreign students, but the rush to get everyone capable of reading a comic to uni now looks outdated.
It looked misconceived at the time, and somewhat contrary to the other message being advanced a lot during my schooling in the 90s that ther are different types of intelligence and ability, and book learning was not for everyone and didn't mean people should not be afforded respect and opportunity.
Since then schools have gone down the there is one type of learning route. And it is academic and based around the acquisition of facts to enable you to pass exams. All the crafty, arty, sporty, technical, imaginative and creative stuff is a complete waste of time and won't fit in amongst the vital knowledge of dangling modifiers, Roman numerals and Harold Hadrada which the Tories deemed essential for a modern economy.
Partly thanks to Gove, partly because all that book learning is way cheaper to deliver.
Yeah. I'd edited my original comment because I didn't believe not naming the guilty parties was wrong. That the Tories still maintain the Gove reforms were a shining success says a lot. They only disown what they did when the system collapses. Then blame others
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
It's an extraordinarily weird debt, first up the nominal value goes up at RPI +3, so it's increasing in real terms each year - essentially it is designed to be a tax rather than a debt but if you're rich enough you can just pay it off ! So it's a tax for most people, unless you're rich in which case it's a debt or you're poor in which case it isn't relevant or for most people effectively a tax but with a whacking great psychological nominal figure next to it that'll be written off after 30 years or so.
A real Frankenstein's monster of a system tbh.
I don't know what an average £ of the debt would sell for in the open market tbh since when it gets to it's highest point it suddenly hits zero.
It was a fudge to give the LDs the graduate tax that they wanted, whilst still theoretically keeping it as a debt like Osborne did.
It's obscene and not fair.
o/t but I will maintain, perhaps to my dying day, that Osborne was a ghastly chancellor.
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
Osborne was pure politics, and short-termist at that.
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
Things like the introduction of the OBR (whose forecasts are slightly less good than reading tea leaves) form a very poisonous legacy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
I have it on good authority Osborne secretly favoured EMU.
Of course he did - and Cameron.
Not sure about Cameron, actually. I think he was agnostic or mildly sceptical- classic Shire Tory.
Osborne was basically an uber orange book LD with career ambitions, so chose the Tories.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
That should fill every one with utter dread as we've seen Goodwins definition of Army before.
Balaclava thugs with petrol bombs maiming the Police, their dogs and horses.
For all the heated argument, it is verbal argument.
You'd better toevthe line Mr Goodwin.
The British public are watching.
Perhaps you've misunderstood. There's a by-election and Reform want to get their voters actually going out to vote. Creating circumstances in which their voters will either barricade themselves indoors or join in a thuggish battleground will not tend to increase Reform's chances of winning.
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Job applications are one of the things that's been utterly stuffed by A... electronic generation of text. Because anyone can now fire off hundreds of applications, the system is largely gummed up and firms can't get the number of candidates down to a small enough number that they can meaningfully process them.
I reject outright any Chatgpt written applications. You can tell. Don't do it kids.
We're in a weird phase where everyone is being encouraged to use emerging AI tools as much as possible to be efficient etc, but they are not quite there yet, so their usefulness is not as much as is promised as the ultimate endgoal (which may be achieved in many cases), and in simple tasks like writing an application or creating an ad, there can be a strong countering reaction against its use, which actually makes them less than useful in those cases.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Will there be any point in paying for a degree once AI has taken over all the entry-level jobs, though?
Well given you will still be unemployed even with no degree you may as well do a degree for the fun of it while in between full time jobs and living off your by then inevitable robot tax funded universal basic income.
If you want to become a lawyer or doctor or teacher you will also still need a degree unless AI is doing all those jobs too
“On paper, Ollie Kettle appears to be the ideal candidate for a competitive work experience placement.
The 21-year-old achieved straight A grades at A-level and is predicted to graduate with a first-class degree in biology from the University of Bath this summer.
But last year, at the end of his second year of university, he applied for more than 120 summer internships in banking and finance – and did not secure a single one.
Ollie heard back from fewer than 5pc of the roles he applied for, leaving him with three interviews that all eventually turned into rejections.”
STEM, Uni of Bath. First class degree. No job. £50,000 in debt
Hoyle will have been Speaker for 10 years come the next election, with 30+ years as an MP under his belt - surely time to start thinking about successors.
That Bercow chap could come back as an MP, given he was never given a peerage.
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Job applications are one of the things that's been utterly stuffed by A... electronic generation of text. Because anyone can now fire off hundreds of applications, the system is largely gummed up and firms can't get the number of candidates down to a small enough number that they can meaningfully process them.
It's impossible, even after recruitment have whittled it down to a *a few hundred*, and even then it's just barely disguised AI. I think we should justg give up tbh - in person oral statements on the top of Rockall. At 5am. An access ramp will be provided to sea level.
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Though if you have no degree HR will bin your application for many middle class office jobs and you won't even get to the interview stage
Yes, I don't know when it was decided that certain jobs had to have it as a 'required' element rather than, say, 'desirable', but it is bloody odd when it is a job with many people in it who started out without a degree, and never suggested it was needed.
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
I agree with so many of your posts and this is no exception
She has improved and is easy to listen to so much so my wife is charmed by her
The conservative party were rightly decimated in 2024, but largely due to Starmer's failures and poor governance resulting in the rise of extreme right and left parties, there will be space for Kemi not least because I expect Reform to implode
She has already announced she will scrap stamp duty on house sales, re-instate the 2 child cap, review all aspects of the economy and most recently address student loans
Apparently she has more announcements for young people and for me this is a welcome change from pandering to pensioners
I hope in time she will address the triple lock, but I am sure she knows she has a long hard road to walk down to GE29
I am supportive as we need a functioning consevative party as an antidote to the obnxious Farage and his party
The problem I have with her currently is she's playing the game of offering all kinds of nice things - stamp duty, the two child cap and now student loans but we are running a budget deficit of £120-140 billion and I don't yet see how she plans to reduce that as presumably she will seek to reduce taxation so it looks as though public spending will be in for the pain and she will need to explain to those who see their services reduced and their benefits cut why they should need to suffer in order others who frankly have plenty of wealth by comparison see their taxes reduced.
Indeed, I see her as only slightly different to the ex-Corbynite who is running to lead Newham Council on the platform of freezing Council Tax and restoring free parking for the first car in any household.
Yes, people will like it and vote for it but it's fiscally irresponsible and politically dishonest.
I'd have more respect for her if she were honest with the electorate and she accepted some of the things the Government in which she served as a Cabinet Minister weren't the best policies or at the very least admitted they didn't work as planned. Trying to airbrush the 2010-24 (and especially the 2019-24) administrations isn't a good look.
Surely the two child cap saves money, rather than being an offering of nice things that the govt can't afford?
We have done an immense cruelty to a lot of young people
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Job applications are one of the things that's been utterly stuffed by A... electronic generation of text. Because anyone can now fire off hundreds of applications, the system is largely gummed up and firms can't get the number of candidates down to a small enough number that they can meaningfully process them.
I reject outright any Chatgpt written applications. You can tell. Don't do it kids.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Will there be any point in paying for a degree once AI has taken over all the entry-level jobs, though?
Well given you will still be unemployed even with no degree you may as well do a degree for the fun of it while in between full time jobs and living off your by then inevitable robot tax funded universal basic income.
If you want to become a lawyer or doctor or teacher you will also still need a degree unless AI is doing all those jobs too
But then you end up with £50,000 debt. Age 22. And no job
You talk like being a 3 year undergrad student is a freebie
Jobber O'Brien is super cross With Kemi and the pedo protectors comment I dont think you will find the electorate are
Even desperate Dan Hodges who has been damp with excitement with her recently was very terse today about her abject performance
No he wasnt
Read his twitter feed said she lost focus and poor
Not it does not. Not a particular good session for Kemi Badenoch there. Had a couple of decent moments, but was too unfocussed. Roaming from tuition fees to pedophiles to leadership digs. She's much better when she pins Keir Starmer down on one issue.
That is in no way 'very terse about her abject performance"
The chutzpah of going after Labour on plan 2 tuition fees when the Cons and LDs created the plan 2 deal and froze the threshold 10 years out of 14 is off the scale.
When it comes to this, fiddling with interest rates and thresholds seems insane, why not just "forgive" part of the debt? Start with the fees for graduates final year. Seems fairer than anything else.
Fact is Lewis apologised for the ambush and his conduct
Fact he categorically did not had not changed his mind that she was spouting bollox and that was why he intervened
You are being utterly disingenuous to suggest otherwise and I know and you know you are deliberately doing that.
He apologised for behavior He knows she's talking out of her backside
Read it again
He said he welcomed the dialogue and they agreed to meetings over it
I've read it
He is going to talk to her.
He has regularly done with others.
NOWHERE absolutely NOWHERE does he imply or suggest that he has changed his mind for the reason for his angry intervention to tell he she is PLAIN WRONG
Yes sometimes you have to shout as you are claiming something that you know is categorically untrue.
Lewis is angry that she is trying to mislead on a Tory error and mislead on the outcome of her proposals.
Why do you think he stormed on in a rage.
What seems to be getting to you is Kemi is leading the agenda and blind siding labour
Maybe its just Kemi is winning arguments and it causes you great distress
What's upsetting you is that someone is questioning your ramping up and adulation
Man up and admit that Lewis is adamant she is wrong and has only apologised for his behaviour.
She may be setting agendas on your head, she may be in her head but when Lewis eviscerates her plans, as he has done with Reeves and Hunt she is going to look pretty stupid.
I hate spin and lies I will out spin and lies
I have never 'adulated' any politician
Kemi is asking all the right questions, being the only woman leader of the main parties and who could become the UK's first black PM
As far as ramping, in my 12 years contributing to this site there has not been anyone near you for ramping !!!!
I'm not sure the fact Kemi Badenoch is female is or should be of the slightest consequence and neither is her ethnicity of any relevance.
I'll be honest - she's in a far better place than she was this time last year - her principal adversary is no longer in the party which always helps but we have yet to see this improved performance translate much into electoral success.
The equivalent YouGov this time last year had the Conservatives on 22% - now they are on 18%. You can tell me how much better she is now and I won't argue but as Hague found out, good Commons performances and winning the political skirmishes are as nothing if you aren't getting the votes in the boxes.
The other truth is it's a marathon not a sprint - there will be bumps along the way and as the election approaches, we will be entitled to question what the Party is putting in the manifesto which is how it should be.
This is all true and fair, but although it is a marathon and not a sprint, she doesn't have the luxury of knowing she will be allowed to finish the race - if her improved performance does not lead to her closing the gap with the leaders, she'll be taken to one side and told to just stop jogging.
I think Badenoch has done well by shedding her more toxic colleagues to Reform, and should survive even a dire set of May elections. She should last the year, and perhaps even to the GE and do well enough to be allowed 2 questions at PMQ's after that.
You are going to be in so much pain when the Tories come roaring back.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Anecdata from a rather depressing conversation my wife had with two university friends the other day: Child a - always top of her class through school (admittedly at small town Catholic schools) with good degree in geography from Durham, followed (because no jobs) by a pointless masters in online communities and their norms* - now back home and without success in applying for jobs in the last six months. Is applying for TA jobs. Child b - always top of her class through school (admittedly at quite rough schools) - went to Newcastle University to study sociology** - has drifted from temp job to temp job for the last two years. Child c - always bright at school - is at Loughborough studying computing and suffering from depression at the pointlessness of it all - neither going to lectures nor having a social life, but not doing quite badly enough to get thrown out and paralysed by indecision. Child d - who is a genuine genius - just started in maths at Lancaster, following a switch from Manchester two weeks in whuch turned out not to be the experience he hoped - doing ok but not really flourishing (he will, I'm sure, fund a role, because he is a genuine genius. Should have been at Cambridge but fickle interview process.) Stepchild e - six months into degree at Newcastle Uni, but disillusionment and ennui has set in - wants to drop out but her actual mother won't let her. Stepchild f - only 16 but doesn't want to go to uni. Wants to be a chef.
So far, the young people in my extended family have bypassed University and are thriving in various trades.
While becoming a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, an academic, a vicar even a nurse or senior police officer requires a degree universities will not be doomed. Even the likes of Goldman Sachs have student only internships.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
Will there be any point in paying for a degree once AI has taken over all the entry-level jobs, though?
Well given you will still be unemployed even with no degree you may as well do a degree for the fun of it while in between full time jobs and living off your by then inevitable robot tax funded universal basic income.
If you want to become a lawyer or doctor or teacher you will also still need a degree unless AI is doing all those jobs too
But then you end up with £50,000 debt. Age 22. And no job
You talk like being a 3 year undergrad student is a freebie
Especially insane when for today's students on Plan 5 the repayment threshold is less than 40 hours a week a National Minimum Wage.
Comments
https://www.gq.com/story/what-is-bonesmashing-looksmaxxing-technique
His biggest mis-step was of course stamp duty. An insane friction on the market.
Reeves, although I very much disagree with her political thinking is a far better Chancellor than Osborne.
How many votes did Marie's lot get in your constituency ? Was it over 50% in the first round or did they need to go to the run off ?
Let the weaker ones close.
Hoyle supplied some information to the police, which was leaked.
He's done nothing wrong.
9 Rural Suffolk CC green seats and
3 City Norfolk CC green seats plus a number on Norwich City Council
Are up. How will they fare in each?
I expect them to hold most but struggle more in the former with vote share
She has improved and is easy to listen to so much so my wife is charmed by her
The conservative party were rightly decimated in 2024, but largely due to Starmer's failures and poor governance resulting in the rise of extreme right and left parties, there will be space for Kemi not least because I expect Reform to implode
She has already announced she will scrap stamp duty on house sales, re-instate the 2 child cap, review all aspects of the economy and most recently address student loans
Apparently she has more announcements for young people and for me this is a welcome change from pandering to pensioners
I hope in time she will address the triple lock, but I am sure she knows she has a long hard road to walk down to GE29
I am supportive as we need a functioning consevative party as an antidote to the obnxious Farage and his party
So he deserved his holibobs in BVI.
And yet in May 2025 Labour only stood in half the seats of the county (through choice or lack of options) and were getting around 5-6%, with the LDs on 5x that.
Ok, Labour will have dropped in popularity just between 2024 and 2025, plus the LDs have the local pedigree, but though Labour did better in the 2021 locals in the area they still were only getting around 12-13%, despite the parliamentaries showing there's a lot of people who would like to vote for them.
The traditional opportunity to protest vote against the government.
So for those who are too posh to vote Reform a vote for the Greens offers a way to vote against both Labour and the Conservatives.
The mystery is why the LibDems are not picking up these votes as they did in the 1990s and 2000s.
There really are some indications that she's a keeper.
It didn't work in the internet era and its going to be a disaster in the AI era.
Her article states 54% of graduates still immediately enter the workforce.
The graduate earnings premium may have declined but is still there:
'Graduates born in 1990 earned 11% more than non-graduates at age 26, compared to the 19% graduate premium enjoyed by graduates born in 1970. '
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/22-10-2019/return-to-degree-research
Keeping them once in government is the hard bit.
What is harder to tell is whether Reform/Greens of today realise it will get harder once they are in power, or will be befuddled about it happening to them. I think some know, others do not.
Not that it's impossible for them to succeed once they are in, that no real change is manageable, but some things are just inherently resistant to populist rhetoric.
I can see 50-80% of universities closing. Just shutting down. They will disguise the pain as “merging” but it’s inevitable
1. Degrees are hideously expensive
2. Grade inflation has made many valueless
3. The foreign student Ponzi scheme is ending
4. There are no jobs at the end any more
5. The teaching can nearly all be done for free remotely, online
6. Students are getting stupider like everyone else so what’s the point
That’s just six enormous problems.
Within a decade higher education will be a howling wasteland
Just last week they polled ahead of both Labour and Tories.
Indeed, I see her as only slightly different to the ex-Corbynite who is running to lead Newham Council on the platform of freezing Council Tax and restoring free parking for the first car in any household.
Yes, people will like it and vote for it but it's fiscally irresponsible and politically dishonest.
I'd have more respect for her if she were honest with the electorate and she accepted some of the things the Government in which she served as a Cabinet Minister weren't the best policies or at the very least admitted they didn't work as planned. Trying to airbrush the 2010-24 (and especially the 2019-24) administrations isn't a good look.
Round two Kemi/Lewis
I think he just enjoyed manipulating others.
The great Lobachesky had nothing to do with me being the great mathematician that I am today. (I'm not, but mainly because I didn't ever get a copy of the proper phone directories)
The round 2 from Martin Lewis point of view.
And it is academic and based around the acquisition of facts to enable you to pass exams.
All the crafty, arty, sporty, technical, imaginative and creative stuff is a complete waste of time and can't fit in what with the vital need for knowledge of dangling modifiers, Roman numerals and Harold Hadrada which Michael Gove and his merry band of rigorous Tory think tanks deemed essential for a modern economy.
He only introduced it because it was a requirement of EMU - the same reason Brown made the Bank of England independent. Also deeply damaging.
So the easy path is taken - nothing good will be lost, reductions will only be in vague terms, people will pay less and get more, what's not to like?
I have tried to advise them: “no one can predict the future now, it’s so volatile. If you want to study, study what you love. No job is safe”
The older is really enjoying her time at St Andrews but she says all her friends talk with dread of the job desert when they graduate. It’s happening, it’s real, unis are doomed
The 2 child cap saves money but we need completely new thinking and I believe she understands that
What I do believe is the country need to comprehensively reject the policies being put forward by Reform and the Greens
@GoodwinMJ
·
1h
Tomorrow will see one of the biggest Get Out The Vote operations in the history of British politics. I cannot give you the numbers but we have an army.
Thank you to all those supporting our campaign. I salute you 🫡
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/2026704754445848773
I read it on PB, so it must be true.
Balaclava thugs with petrol bombs maiming the Police, their dogs and horses.
For all the heated argument, it is verbal argument.
You'd better toevthe line Mr Goodwin.
The British public are watching.
“I have applied to over 200 jobs and internships and faced relentless rejection. The psychological toll has been immense. It is devastating to feel that years of discipline, sacrifice and achievement have led nowhere.
The Government speaks of opportunity while presiding over a broken graduate job market – one that increasingly overlooks domestic students who have worked tirelessly to overcome social disadvantage. If this is the outcome for those who never fell below an A*, what message does that send to the next generation?
Yours sincerely,
– Anon”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/im-a-straight-a-student-with-a-first-from-ucl-cant-get-job/
50 years ago being a nurse was more similar to working in a care home today than working as a nurse today.
kle4 MD
Osborne was awful, and (to my mind) car crashed a really very good PM in Cameron (although he car crashed himself later)
https://x.com/i/status/2026714120955826534
That the Tories still maintain the Gove reforms were a shining success says a lot.
They only disown what they did when the system collapses. Then blame others
Child a - always top of her class through school (admittedly at small town Catholic schools) with good degree in geography from Durham, followed (because no jobs) by a pointless masters in online communities and their norms* - now back home and without success in applying for jobs in the last six months. Is applying for TA jobs.
Child b - always top of her class through school (admittedly at quite rough schools) - went to Newcastle University to study sociology** - has drifted from temp job to temp job for the last two years.
Child c - always bright at school - is at Loughborough studying computing and suffering from depression at the pointlessness of it all - neither going to lectures nor having a social life, but not doing quite badly enough to get thrown out and paralysed by indecision.
Child d - who is a genuine genius - just started in maths at Lancaster, following a switch from Manchester two weeks in whuch turned out not to be the experience he hoped - doing ok but not really flourishing (he will, I'm sure, fund a role, because he is a genuine genius. Should have been at Cambridge but fickle interview process.)
Stepchild e - six months into degree at Newcastle Uni, but disillusionment and ennui has set in - wants to drop out but her actual mother won't let her.
Stepchild f - only 16 but doesn't want to go to uni. Wants to be a chef.
Energy efficiency plays into the former, and demographics into the latter - and we've stalled on both.
Countering that is AI, which could drive growth, but we've got a fanatic in charge of energy who sees the demands of data centres primarily as a threat to him achieving Net Zero.
That Bercow chap could come back as an MP, given he was never given a peerage.
Four passengers on a U.S. speedboat shot and killed by Cuban coast guard, six injured, says Cuban embassy
The 21-year-old achieved straight A grades at A-level and is predicted to graduate with a first-class degree in biology from the University of Bath this summer.
But last year, at the end of his second year of university, he applied for more than 120 summer internships in banking and finance – and did not secure a single one.
Ollie heard back from fewer than 5pc of the roles he applied for, leaving him with three interviews that all eventually turned into rejections.”
STEM, Uni of Bath. First class degree. No job. £50,000 in debt
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/jobs/career-advice/forget-getting-job-cant-even-get-work-experience/
Go Greens!
Not the best speaker of my lifetime but better than his two predecessors by a country mile.
Get better or get off.
Also, in his defence, his father was mentioned in a Carter USM song.
Osborne was basically an uber orange book LD with career ambitions, so chose the Tories.
If you want to become a lawyer or doctor or teacher you will also still need a degree unless AI is doing all those jobs too
You talk like being a 3 year undergrad student is a freebie
You may even need to see a doctor...
https://x.com/repcarlos/status/2026737976907067395
The dictatorship in #Cuba has just attacked a boat from Florida & murdered those on board.
This regime must be relegated to the dust bin of history!
Let alone being a "good" pay rate.