The prime minister references behaviour at pro-Palestinian marches, saying that while "of course" the UK protects freedom of speech, "if you are marching with people wearing pictures of paragliders without calling it out, you are venerating the murder of Jews," he says. He adds: "If you are standing alongside people saying 'globalise the intifada', you are calling for terrorism against Jews." Starmer says that people who use that phrase "should be prosecuted", as it is "extreme racism".
Some of pointed this out a long time ago.....but we got the plod pinhead dancing about Jihad having different meanings and arresting the Iranian bloke who holding a sign saying Hamas are terrorists.
Talking of paragliders.
‘ He said he had "decided not to punish" the defendants, and handed the trio each a 12-month conditional discharge.’
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
This announcement is brought to the by the "ah, Starmer may be bad, but let's stick with him a bit longer" campaign.
I cannot quite get over that Streeting's seat is likely to be lost even in a scenario where they retain 90% of their support from 2024, so does that not make those backing him nervous? Or are they assuming a chicken run despite his denials?
The prime minister references behaviour at pro-Palestinian marches, saying that while "of course" the UK protects freedom of speech, "if you are marching with people wearing pictures of paragliders without calling it out, you are venerating the murder of Jews," he says. He adds: "If you are standing alongside people saying 'globalise the intifada', you are calling for terrorism against Jews." Starmer says that people who use that phrase "should be prosecuted", as it is "extreme racism".
Some of pointed this out a long time ago.....but we got the plod pinhead dancing about Jihad having different meanings and arresting the Iranian bloke who holding a sign saying Hamas are terrorists.
Talking of paragliders.
‘ He said he had "decided not to punish" the defendants, and handed the trio each a 12-month conditional discharge.’
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Patrick De Haan @GasBuddyGuy · 2h Every. Single. State. Has higher gas prices today compared to a week ago. Biggest jumps: IN +84c/gal (yes, 84 cents in a WEEK) MI +72c/gal OH +60c/gal IL +39c/gal NM +37c/gal
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Next thing you'll be telling me it is unlikely Samson killed 1000 Philistines with the jawbone of an Ass.
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
This announcement is brought to the by the "ah, Starmer may be bad, but let's stick with him a bit longer" campaign.
I cannot quite get over that Streeting's seat is likely to be lost even in a scenario where they retain 90% of their support from 2024, so does that not make those backing him nervous? Or are they assuming a chicken run despite his denials?
We retained office, winning unexpectedly in 2029, but sadly our PM Wes Streeting lost his seat and was out of the Commons for the first two months of the new parliament.
The suspect in the Golders Green terror attack has been named as Essa Suleiman, a Somali-born British man who was jailed for stabbing a police officer and his dog.
Suleiman, who at one stage lived in Camberwell, south-east London, was arrested on Wednesday after two Jewish men were stabbed near a synagogue in the north of the capital.
The 45-year-old had previously been jailed indefinitely for stabbing PC Neil Sampson in January 2008.
Clearly the word "indefinitely" means something different these days.
It's always meant several different things.
In criminal law sentencing it means a minimum sentence (usually), but no fixed or defined maximum. The purpose is supposedly public protection, and the duration of the sentence is linked to that. The system (like most of the criminal justice system) is under-resourced, and fallible.
The suspect in the Golders Green terror attack has been named as Essa Suleiman, a Somali-born British man who was jailed for stabbing a police officer and his dog.
Suleiman, who at one stage lived in Camberwell, south-east London, was arrested on Wednesday after two Jewish men were stabbed near a synagogue in the north of the capital.
The 45-year-old had previously been jailed indefinitely for stabbing PC Neil Sampson in January 2008.
If he was jailed indefinitely 18 years ago, why was he back on the street?
Also, when exactly did he become British?
A judge ruled that Suleiman should serve at least four and a half years for grievous bodily harm and only be considered for release when he was no longer a risk to the public.
He was jailed under an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence, which forces dangerous offenders to serve a minimum tariff before their release is considered by a parole board. IPPs sentenced were introduced by Labour in 2005 before they were abolished by the coalition government in 2012.
Referred to Prevent in 2020, deemed no threat a year later.
Well clearly he’s about to get two more GBH charges at best, if not attempted murder.
There should of course be a public inquiry into his case over the past decade and a half, but we all know already what the outcome would be, and that the lessons would not in practice be learned.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Next thing you'll be telling me it is unlikely Samson killed 1000 Philistines with the jawbone of an Ass.
It was 1041, with 234 serious injuries.
Also England came into existence 32 years, 6 month, 14 days, 4 hours, 32 minutes, 18 seconds and 11 yoctoseconds before Scotland. It was a busy Thursday.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Next thing you'll be telling me it is unlikely Samson killed 1000 Philistines with the jawbone of an Ass.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Next thing you'll be telling me it is unlikely Samson killed 1000 Philistines with the jawbone of an Ass.
It was 1041, with 234 serious injuries. .
Makes sense. Poor Philistines surely didn't deserve everything they got - whilst King Saul had other motivations did David think it odd that he was asked to bring 100 Philistine foreskins, and when be brought back 200 instead was that really justified? What did they even do with them?
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
One can tie oneself into knots with semantics, but the mainstream view is clear: Israel has a right to exist and to provide sanctuary to Jews but should treat non-Jews who live there on an equal basis. People not in power in Israel (including virtually everyone in Britain) have zero responsibility for what the Israeli government does and should not be punished (or credited) for it. If they wish to express an opinion in support or opposed to it, it's reasonable to praise or criticise them as part of normal debate.
None of this is anti-semitism, any more than it's anti-American to say that President Trump appears to be bonkers, while remaining friendly to Americans in general.
Great idea but we’d need portable electric bike charging leads too, preferably with a uniform end that plugs into the socket in the charging point.
One example could be a 3 pin external socket. Most of us carry a chargers for use in eg cafes if we have detachable batteries. I get RCD protected doubles for about £25. The cost would be negligible if made a standard requirement for street-side or parking area chargers.
it looks like a basic legal requirement under "Equal provision of services" law, which has been in place for more than 3 decades.
It feels to me to be one that has just not been thought about - a blindspot. I'm embarrassed that I had not copped this one.
It would cause mental explosions amongst the "roads are for motor vehicles" brigade, but that's just something that happens whatever you do. A person using a mobility scooter is an equally important traveller as a person in a motor vehicle (and in law arguably a more entitled road user).
Back from my walk in the park. It’s lush. It’s changed a bit in the last year. I’m going for a cycle round it tomorrow. New paths and paving over the old mud ones.
Would also need a way to ensure the cable could not be detached from the charge point and battery by some little chav.
Yes, but that is also the case for car chargers, and they have mechanisms that autolock the plug to the socket.
My £25 external double sockets all come with a loop I can put a padlock on.
There are actually quite a number of car charging setups around the UK with a 13pin connector eg Zapmap shows 6 in Nottingham, so they must have some mechanism.
At the Bosch cycle charging stations on the NCN and at the National Trust, they seem to have a storage locker with the charging in it where you put your battery, having taken it off the bike.
My electric bike is a Carrera and my plug in charger has no mechanism to stop it being withdrawn when charging
That Bosch cycle charging station sounds ideal for circumventing that issue.
I'm very interested in cultural assumptions, which are blind spots.
We've run up against a lot of that in the Mobility Aids consultation, and specifically around external limitations imposed on disabled people which are not imposed on their able-bodied equivalents.
One is inherited from the old invalid carriages being limited to one person (remember the light blue Invacars). Do we think that disabled people do not have families, partners and children? The consultation had a hard-wired assumption around "should a mobility aid be able to carry a passenger" (ie one passenger)?
What is a disabled parent with 2 small kids to get to school supposed to do if they have no driving license or car, or don't want one? Yet if cycling they could put 2 kids in a trailer, but a mobility scooter or powerchair is not allowed a trailer. There are already 4 seater cycles on the market.
But we have actual law (Mental Capacity Act 2005) that says assumptions about people's ability to make decisions should not be made without a specific medical finding.
Our law and culture are full of such unlawful assumptions.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Nevertheless, Jews in the UK are not responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. Just as Muslims in the UK were not responsible for the attacks of October 7.
Of course they are not. I was addressing a separate point entirely about the legitimacy of criticising Israel and "a majority of Israelis".
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
This announcement is brought to the by the "ah, Starmer may be bad, but let's stick with him a bit longer" campaign.
I cannot quite get over that Streeting's seat is likely to be lost even in a scenario where they retain 90% of their support from 2024, so does that not make those backing him nervous? Or are they assuming a chicken run despite his denials?
They could put someone in the Lords, and he'll win the by-election. What's wrong with that?
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
This announcement is brought to the by the "ah, Starmer may be bad, but let's stick with him a bit longer" campaign.
I cannot quite get over that Streeting's seat is likely to be lost even in a scenario where they retain 90% of their support from 2024, so does that not make those backing him nervous? Or are they assuming a chicken run despite his denials?
They could put someone in the Lords, and he'll win the by-election. What's wrong with that?
I think it is an argument they'd rather not have, anad that the question would constantly come up that if they are not certain he will win his own seat how could they be confident in saving anyone elses.
Labour Party approach to anti semitism after the latest attack on Jews from a, as reported in the press., British National
My proposal of what to do...
Ban Twitter. It's full of antisemitism. From the right, from the left.
Well, Elon did post "You have said the actual truth" in a reply to a Tweet saying that the Jews were engineering the mass migration of minorities to eliminate white people.
The bit I never really understood about this is why the Jews would be keen to import to lots of Muslims who hate them rather more -on average- than white people.
But then again, what do I know.
Because Islam was invented by Jews to control the world... is what I heard in a queue during the pandemic.
But yeah, if you want to do something about antisemitism, I'd start with a system run by an AntiSemite that is pumping this stuff into people's eyes.
The idea of removing defence spending from the scope of fiscal rules is gaining traction. Andy Burnham mentioned it yesterday (“There’s certainly a case, when we look at the pressure on defence spending, to consider that exceptionally outside of the rules”). What might this mean?
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
"should a race kick off"??
Someone has to start a race in this case unless Starmer resigns which is not going to.
Is this going to be like Gordo all over again, they are going to get rid, their is a coup in the offering, they are saying after you, no after, no after you, look at my banana, we all back Gordon, he is the right man for the job.
From what I read Keir Starmer definitely is/isn’t safe from a challenge which definitely is/isn’t going to come from Angela Rayner who definitely is/isn’t going to call for him to go/accept a job in a reshuffle that definitely is/isn’t happening because she is worried Wes Streeting definitely is/isn’t about to launch a challenge of his own to head off Andy Burnham who definitely is/isn’t in a pact with a Labour MP to take a Commons seat. Hope that’s clear
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
This announcement is brought to the by the "ah, Starmer may be bad, but let's stick with him a bit longer" campaign.
I cannot quite get over that Streeting's seat is likely to be lost even in a scenario where they retain 90% of their support from 2024, so does that not make those backing him nervous? Or are they assuming a chicken run despite his denials?
They could put someone in the Lords, and he'll win the by-election. What's wrong with that?
The ghost of Patrick Gordon Walker says, "maybe not" !
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
It is plain you don't understand what Zionism actually means. It is explicit in believing that the Jewish homeland should encompass all of the Palestine and should have as few non-Jews living in it as possible. It actively encourages ethnic cleansing and the seizing of lands well beyond what was agreed in 1948.
No sane, reasonable person should deny the right of Israel to exist and the Jewish people to have a homeland. At the same time no sane, reasonable person should support the Zionist view of what this homeland should be and what it would mean for any non-Jews living there. We are seeing zionism in action in the West Bank settler movement. If you support that then you are as bad as the anti-Semites and other racists
Zionism means different things to different people, surely.
To some people, 'Zionism' refers to the right of the State of Israel to exist. To others, it refers -as you say- to the belief that Israel should encompass all the land from the river to the sea. (And -of course- there are many proponents of that version of Zionism in the current Israeli cabinet.)
Well the original meaning was very clear when it was started. And the actions of successive Israeli Governments and those who advocate 'Zionism' have been equally clear. One reason why so many Jews would consider themselves 'anti-Zionist'.
Edit: And as an aside if you look at the map of proposed Israel drawn up by the World Zionist Organisation for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference it goes well beyond 'from the river to the sea'.
I'm not sure that's true.
The original term for what you describe is actually closest to Revisionist Zionism (one of several competing ideologies), as developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_Zionism
Of course the various Zionist ideologies were developed between the wars, or even earlier, during times when both Communism and Fascism were also seen as credible political theories, so were prone to comparably unrealistic expectations and impracticalities. What Zionism means today is different - and equally contested.
Not really. What I am quoting are the views of the founder of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl. This has been the mainstream view of Zionism since the late 19th century and it inculcated the early post 1948 views of Israeli leaders. One only has to look at the comments of Golda Meir in the 60s who claimed there was no such thing as Palestinians.
So why is Wales so different from Scotland? Longer time joined to England? Better appreciation of economic reality?
Well I think I’m right in saying that Welsh gdp per head is about 75% of the U.K. average. That’s about Slovakia/Portugal levels and is in itself before you took off back office U.K. jobs like the DVLA in Swansea, Companies House in Cardiff, Stats and Patent offices in Newport, the Army in Brecon, the RAF on Anglesey etc etc and the transfers to level benefits and pensions to U.K. levels. In other words it makes a full fat five years of Zack Polanski govt in Westminster look like a mild cold compared to bubonic plague.
And that’s before we get to the Euro/Sterling, EU/English single market questions.
Oddly the much healthier position of the Welsh language could provide a drag with latent suspicions that everyone would be made to convert ( wouldn’t happen in reality, but it’s a question that doesn’t even arise in Scotland given about 1% speak Gaelic).
Interestingly too about 30% of the population is not born in Wales ( overwhelmingly in England) and I’d guess two thirds of the population lives within an hour of the English border, so the obvious integration with England runs deeper than Scotland.
On your last point: Wales is better linked to England than it is to itself. It is much easier to get from North Wales to Liverpool and Manchester than it is to Cardiff. And from South Wales to Bristol and London than to Wrexham or Holyhead. This isn't really true of Scotland, which is a more coherent economic unit. That doesn't necessarily affect feelings of nationhood, but it probably does affect how people feel about going it alone as a country.
Yes I think that’s right. For example, Newport saw a 9% population increase at the last census, the biggest in Wales, with a considerable proportion likely being Bristolians seeing how much further the money goes there, whilst having toll free commuting travel these days across the Severn. Manchester is about 1 hr 15 from Wrexham too, whilst Cardiff is probably 5 hours from Holyhead.
Yet none of that is going to stop anyone equally draping themselves in a dragon to watch rugby or football be they in Cowbridge or Caersws.
Therein lies Plaid’s ultimate conundrum.
Well, Labour have failed in nearly thirty years of running Welsh government to improve transport links between North and South Wales, so I guess that would be an obvious place for Plaid to start.
It's geography. There's a bloody big hill in the middle of it. So traffic is routed around the coast.
Labour and then SNP in Scotland have had similar issues linking the north and south.
Yes there are lots of hills! However most of the north south connections, certainly from SE Wales to NE wales (or even Gwynedd) tend to go through Herefordshire/Shropshire either by road or rail because it’s quicker. Indeed it’s probable the beef on the bone ban ( remember that?) collapsed because Wales made it legal and there was a temporary situation where a butcher en route from Cardiff to Wrexham would be carrying illegal contraband on the A49 route through the Marches but perfectly within the law if they stuck to the A470. Could’ve made a latter day Ealing comedy out of that.
I had forgotten about that! What larks Lived for a while in Shropshire, nothing moves fast there.
The A5/A49/A466 link between North and South East Wales would be a very decent route but for an added 15 minutes due entirely to just one major blockage point. Hereford. If Hereford were in Wales it would have had a by-pass long ago, funded by the higher per capita public spending afforded to Wales under the immensely generous Barnett Formula. Maybe Plaid should stand in Herefordshire on a platform of annexing the county for Wales.
The suspect in the Golders Green terror attack has been named as Essa Suleiman, a Somali-born British man who was jailed for stabbing a police officer and his dog.
Suleiman, who at one stage lived in Camberwell, south-east London, was arrested on Wednesday after two Jewish men were stabbed near a synagogue in the north of the capital.
The 45-year-old had previously been jailed indefinitely for stabbing PC Neil Sampson in January 2008.
Clearly the word "indefinitely" means something different these days.
"We'll be taking off momentarily", as they say Stateside.
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
This announcement is brought to the by the "ah, Starmer may be bad, but let's stick with him a bit longer" campaign.
I cannot quite get over that Streeting's seat is likely to be lost even in a scenario where they retain 90% of their support from 2024, so does that not make those backing him nervous? Or are they assuming a chicken run despite his denials?
We retained office, winning unexpectedly in 2029, but sadly our PM Wes Streeting lost his seat and was out of the Commons for the first two months of the new parliament.
Labour would bite your hand off for that result.
Nah, if he becomes leader he'll quickly arrange to be parachuted into a new seat that Labour have an outside chance of winning as opposed to one where he would be a no hoper.
Patrick De Haan @GasBuddyGuy · 2h Every. Single. State. Has higher gas prices today compared to a week ago. Biggest jumps: IN +84c/gal (yes, 84 cents in a WEEK) MI +72c/gal OH +60c/gal IL +39c/gal NM +37c/gal
Labour Party approach to anti semitism after the latest attack on Jews from a, as reported in the press., British National
My proposal of what to do...
Ban Twitter. It's full of antisemitism. From the right, from the left.
Well, Elon did post "You have said the actual truth" in a reply to a Tweet saying that the Jews were engineering the mass migration of minorities to eliminate white people.
The bit I never really understood about this is why the Jews would be keen to import to lots of Muslims who hate them rather more -on average- than white people.
But then again, what do I know.
Because Islam was invented by Jews to control the world... is what I heard in a queue during the pandemic.
But yeah, if you want to do something about antisemitism, I'd start with a system run by an AntiSemite that is pumping this stuff into people's eyes.
Might want to do something about the leader of the party currently heading the polls too.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
It is plain you don't understand what Zionism actually means. It is explicit in believing that the Jewish homeland should encompass all of the Palestine and should have as few non-Jews living in it as possible. It actively encourages ethnic cleansing and the seizing of lands well beyond what was agreed in 1948.
No sane, reasonable person should deny the right of Israel to exist and the Jewish people to have a homeland. At the same time no sane, reasonable person should support the Zionist view of what this homeland should be and what it would mean for any non-Jews living there. We are seeing zionism in action in the West Bank settler movement. If you support that then you are as bad as the anti-Semites and other racists
Zionism means different things to different people, surely.
To some people, 'Zionism' refers to the right of the State of Israel to exist. To others, it refers -as you say- to the belief that Israel should encompass all the land from the river to the sea. (And -of course- there are many proponents of that version of Zionism in the current Israeli cabinet.)
Well the original meaning was very clear when it was started. And the actions of successive Israeli Governments and those who advocate 'Zionism' have been equally clear. One reason why so many Jews would consider themselves 'anti-Zionist'.
Edit: And as an aside if you look at the map of proposed Israel drawn up by the World Zionist Organisation for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference it goes well beyond 'from the river to the sea'.
I'm not sure that's true.
The original term for what you describe is actually closest to Revisionist Zionism (one of several competing ideologies), as developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_Zionism
Of course the various Zionist ideologies were developed between the wars, or even earlier, during times when both Communism and Fascism were also seen as credible political theories, so were prone to comparably unrealistic expectations and impracticalities. What Zionism means today is different - and equally contested.
Not really. What I am quoting are the views of the founder of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl. This has been the mainstream view of Zionism since the late 19th century and it inculcated the early post 1948 views of Israeli leaders. One only has to look at the comments of Golda Meir in the 60s who claimed there was no such thing as Palestinians.
Some early Zionists (pre-WWII) saw the Palestinians as their cousins (which they are) and had a vision of European Jew and the local population of Transjordan, whatever their religion, come together in a socialist utopia.
I saw this and thought it was right on cue - not sure they understand that though
It is perfectly possible to condemn both anti-semitism and the actions of the Israeli government. Both Polanski and Ali condemned the Golders Green attack today too:
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
It is plain you don't understand what Zionism actually means. It is explicit in believing that the Jewish homeland should encompass all of the Palestine and should have as few non-Jews living in it as possible. It actively encourages ethnic cleansing and the seizing of lands well beyond what was agreed in 1948.
No sane, reasonable person should deny the right of Israel to exist and the Jewish people to have a homeland. At the same time no sane, reasonable person should support the Zionist view of what this homeland should be and what it would mean for any non-Jews living there. We are seeing zionism in action in the West Bank settler movement. If you support that then you are as bad as the anti-Semites and other racists
Zionism means different things to different people, surely.
To some people, 'Zionism' refers to the right of the State of Israel to exist. To others, it refers -as you say- to the belief that Israel should encompass all the land from the river to the sea. (And -of course- there are many proponents of that version of Zionism in the current Israeli cabinet.)
Well the original meaning was very clear when it was started. And the actions of successive Israeli Governments and those who advocate 'Zionism' have been equally clear. One reason why so many Jews would consider themselves 'anti-Zionist'.
Edit: And as an aside if you look at the map of proposed Israel drawn up by the World Zionist Organisation for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference it goes well beyond 'from the river to the sea'.
I'm not sure that's true.
The original term for what you describe is actually closest to Revisionist Zionism (one of several competing ideologies), as developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_Zionism
Of course the various Zionist ideologies were developed between the wars, or even earlier, during times when both Communism and Fascism were also seen as credible political theories, so were prone to comparably unrealistic expectations and impracticalities. What Zionism means today is different - and equally contested.
Not really. What I am quoting are the views of the founder of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl. This has been the mainstream view of Zionism since the late 19th century and it inculcated the early post 1948 views of Israeli leaders. One only has to look at the comments of Golda Meir in the 60s who claimed there was no such thing as Palestinians.
Some early Zionists (pre-WWII) saw the Palestinians as their cousins (which they are) and had a vision of European Jew and the local population of Transjordan, whatever their religion, come together in a socialist utopia.
That was very much the text of the Balfour declaration (well maybe not the socialist bit):
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
Patrick De Haan @GasBuddyGuy · 2h Every. Single. State. Has higher gas prices today compared to a week ago. Biggest jumps: IN +84c/gal (yes, 84 cents in a WEEK) MI +72c/gal OH +60c/gal IL +39c/gal NM +37c/gal
Ohio was already flagged up as a problem for the Dems.
Ohio is a Republican defence against Sherrod Brown.
Probably a hold, but far from impossible for Sherrod to win. He did, after all, hold the state in 2018 at the last Senate midterms, and he outperformed Harris by a pretty large margin in 2024.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
It is plain you don't understand what Zionism actually means. It is explicit in believing that the Jewish homeland should encompass all of the Palestine and should have as few non-Jews living in it as possible. It actively encourages ethnic cleansing and the seizing of lands well beyond what was agreed in 1948.
No sane, reasonable person should deny the right of Israel to exist and the Jewish people to have a homeland. At the same time no sane, reasonable person should support the Zionist view of what this homeland should be and what it would mean for any non-Jews living there. We are seeing zionism in action in the West Bank settler movement. If you support that then you are as bad as the anti-Semites and other racists
Zionism means different things to different people, surely.
To some people, 'Zionism' refers to the right of the State of Israel to exist. To others, it refers -as you say- to the belief that Israel should encompass all the land from the river to the sea. (And -of course- there are many proponents of that version of Zionism in the current Israeli cabinet.)
Well the original meaning was very clear when it was started. And the actions of successive Israeli Governments and those who advocate 'Zionism' have been equally clear. One reason why so many Jews would consider themselves 'anti-Zionist'.
Edit: And as an aside if you look at the map of proposed Israel drawn up by the World Zionist Organisation for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference it goes well beyond 'from the river to the sea'.
I'm not sure that's true.
The original term for what you describe is actually closest to Revisionist Zionism (one of several competing ideologies), as developed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_Zionism
Of course the various Zionist ideologies were developed between the wars, or even earlier, during times when both Communism and Fascism were also seen as credible political theories, so were prone to comparably unrealistic expectations and impracticalities. What Zionism means today is different - and equally contested.
Not really. What I am quoting are the views of the founder of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl. This has been the mainstream view of Zionism since the late 19th century and it inculcated the early post 1948 views of Israeli leaders. One only has to look at the comments of Golda Meir in the 60s who claimed there was no such thing as Palestinians.
Some early Zionists (pre-WWII) saw the Palestinians as their cousins (which they are) and had a vision of European Jew and the local population of Transjordan, whatever their religion, come together in a socialist utopia.
That was very much the text of the Balfour declaration (well maybe not the socialist bit):
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
I don't think the Balfour declaration was keen on the socialism bit.
The suspect in the Golders Green terror attack has been named as Essa Suleiman, a Somali-born British man who was jailed for stabbing a police officer and his dog.
Suleiman, who at one stage lived in Camberwell, south-east London, was arrested on Wednesday after two Jewish men were stabbed near a synagogue in the north of the capital.
The 45-year-old had previously been jailed indefinitely for stabbing PC Neil Sampson in January 2008.
Clearly the word "indefinitely" means something different these days.
BERNARD: We all know what "definitely" means, Minister. Something that we are certain is happening. Meanwhile the prefix "in" means "not", as in "incomplete".
HACKER: So your best excuse is that an indefinite sentence is one where we don't have a clue if they're in prison or not?
BERNARD: Yes, Minister.
(Theme tune that isn't the one from To The Manor Born)
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
So why is Wales so different from Scotland? Longer time joined to England? Better appreciation of economic reality?
Well I think I’m right in saying that Welsh gdp per head is about 75% of the U.K. average. That’s about Slovakia/Portugal levels and is in itself before you took off back office U.K. jobs like the DVLA in Swansea, Companies House in Cardiff, Stats and Patent offices in Newport, the Army in Brecon, the RAF on Anglesey etc etc and the transfers to level benefits and pensions to U.K. levels. In other words it makes a full fat five years of Zack Polanski govt in Westminster look like a mild cold compared to bubonic plague.
And that’s before we get to the Euro/Sterling, EU/English single market questions.
Oddly the much healthier position of the Welsh language could provide a drag with latent suspicions that everyone would be made to convert ( wouldn’t happen in reality, but it’s a question that doesn’t even arise in Scotland given about 1% speak Gaelic).
Interestingly too about 30% of the population is not born in Wales ( overwhelmingly in England) and I’d guess two thirds of the population lives within an hour of the English border, so the obvious integration with England runs deeper than Scotland.
On your last point: Wales is better linked to England than it is to itself. It is much easier to get from North Wales to Liverpool and Manchester than it is to Cardiff. And from South Wales to Bristol and London than to Wrexham or Holyhead. This isn't really true of Scotland, which is a more coherent economic unit. That doesn't necessarily affect feelings of nationhood, but it probably does affect how people feel about going it alone as a country.
Yes I think that’s right. For example, Newport saw a 9% population increase at the last census, the biggest in Wales, with a considerable proportion likely being Bristolians seeing how much further the money goes there, whilst having toll free commuting travel these days across the Severn. Manchester is about 1 hr 15 from Wrexham too, whilst Cardiff is probably 5 hours from Holyhead.
Yet none of that is going to stop anyone equally draping themselves in a dragon to watch rugby or football be they in Cowbridge or Caersws.
Therein lies Plaid’s ultimate conundrum.
Well, Labour have failed in nearly thirty years of running Welsh government to improve transport links between North and South Wales, so I guess that would be an obvious place for Plaid to start.
How much would it cost to dual the A487 from Fishguard to Bangor?
and what would be the point?
To get from Fishguard to Bangor within Wales, rather than going to England and up the M5.
Funny how the debate about Welsh transport is so similar to that in Scotland. Insanely costly and bonkers plans to build giant infrastructure projects the entire length of a mountainous country.
You’d get much more bang for your buck by improving local connections. E.g. a bypass for Nairn, or a metro system in and around Cardiff/Swansea/Newport. 90% of spending should be within TTWAs.
Yes this is not unreasonable at all, and realistic in a way that a motorway from Caernarfon to Merthyr just isn’t. In fairness there are plans to stitch together various local lines and call it a South Wales “metro”, sort of covering Cardiff and up the valleys a bit, but it’s all a bit half hearted. In truth, the geography is pretty brutal, there are, I think, 22 valleys (someone correct me) from Swansea to Pontypool with 3-400m tops or more and 200m floors. It just doesn’t lend itself to inter communication like the Jubilee line, or the Mildmay and its siblings.
What is fixable, and the cause of irritation, is that due to an apparent foul up when rebuilding Cardiff bus station ( 8 (!) years in the making) there isn’t enough bus stop capacity at the station, so loads of buses don’t go to it, meaning getting from one side of the Welsh capital to the other and back of an evening on public transport is in the “just forget it” category, and if you’re not a local, you’ll probably need a search party to find you, as you exhaust yourself pounding the streets mournfully seeking the correct bus stop.
The South Wales Metro is proceeding well: an (unusual?) success story for the Welsh Government/Transport For Wales. The YouTuber "Rail Focus" occasionally covers it. Here are some explainers from him
The UK national threat level has been increased from "substantial" to "severe" by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre following the attack in Golders Green.
The raised threat level means an attack is highly likely in the next six months, the government says.
Wow, in a very unusual step the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has sent a blistering letter to Green Party leader Zack Polanski saying he shouldn’t be retweeting “armchair critics” who criticised officers for kicking the Golders Green attacker in the head.
‘ 🚨NEW: An ex-Labour Mayor, Naheed Ejaz, has been jailed for three years for helping her 41-year-old son hide evidence after he raped a 15-year-old girl’
Wow, in a very unusual step the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has sent a blistering letter to Green Party leader Zack Polanski saying he shouldn’t be retweeting “armchair critics” who criticised officers for kicking the Golders Green attacker in the head.
It's extraordinary that he should take such a step so close to an election. I can only imagine that they're seriously worried about the potential for disorder if the story that Polanski reposted were to gain traction.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The Scotland at the beginning was a lot smaller than the current Scotland, with less territory in the south, west and north. But then England in 927 was without a lot of its north too.
Wow, in a very unusual step the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has sent a blistering letter to Green Party leader Zack Polanski saying he shouldn’t be retweeting “armchair critics” who criticised officers for kicking the Golders Green attacker in the head.
Police reaction to this attack has been quite different e.g swiftly getting the name and background of the prep out into the public domain.
The UK national threat level has been increased from "substantial" to "severe" by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre following the attack in Golders Green.
The raised threat level means an attack is highly likely in the next six months, the government says.
These changes to the threat level always seem to happen a few days too late.
So why is Wales so different from Scotland? Longer time joined to England? Better appreciation of economic reality?
Well I think I’m right in saying that Welsh gdp per head is about 75% of the U.K. average. That’s about Slovakia/Portugal levels and is in itself before you took off back office U.K. jobs like the DVLA in Swansea, Companies House in Cardiff, Stats and Patent offices in Newport, the Army in Brecon, the RAF on Anglesey etc etc and the transfers to level benefits and pensions to U.K. levels. In other words it makes a full fat five years of Zack Polanski govt in Westminster look like a mild cold compared to bubonic plague.
And that’s before we get to the Euro/Sterling, EU/English single market questions.
Oddly the much healthier position of the Welsh language could provide a drag with latent suspicions that everyone would be made to convert ( wouldn’t happen in reality, but it’s a question that doesn’t even arise in Scotland given about 1% speak Gaelic).
Interestingly too about 30% of the population is not born in Wales ( overwhelmingly in England) and I’d guess two thirds of the population lives within an hour of the English border, so the obvious integration with England runs deeper than Scotland.
On your last point: Wales is better linked to England than it is to itself. It is much easier to get from North Wales to Liverpool and Manchester than it is to Cardiff. And from South Wales to Bristol and London than to Wrexham or Holyhead. This isn't really true of Scotland, which is a more coherent economic unit. That doesn't necessarily affect feelings of nationhood, but it probably does affect how people feel about going it alone as a country.
Yes I think that’s right. For example, Newport saw a 9% population increase at the last census, the biggest in Wales, with a considerable proportion likely being Bristolians seeing how much further the money goes there, whilst having toll free commuting travel these days across the Severn. Manchester is about 1 hr 15 from Wrexham too, whilst Cardiff is probably 5 hours from Holyhead.
Yet none of that is going to stop anyone equally draping themselves in a dragon to watch rugby or football be they in Cowbridge or Caersws.
Therein lies Plaid’s ultimate conundrum.
Well, Labour have failed in nearly thirty years of running Welsh government to improve transport links between North and South Wales, so I guess that would be an obvious place for Plaid to start.
How much would it cost to dual the A487 from Fishguard to Bangor?
and what would be the point?
To get from Fishguard to Bangor within Wales, rather than going to England and up the M5.
Funny how the debate about Welsh transport is so similar to that in Scotland. Insanely costly and bonkers plans to build giant infrastructure projects the entire length of a mountainous country.
You’d get much more bang for your buck by improving local connections. E.g. a bypass for Nairn, or a metro system in and around Cardiff/Swansea/Newport. 90% of spending should be within TTWAs.
Yes this is not unreasonable at all, and realistic in a way that a motorway from Caernarfon to Merthyr just isn’t. In fairness there are plans to stitch together various local lines and call it a South Wales “metro”, sort of covering Cardiff and up the valleys a bit, but it’s all a bit half hearted. In truth, the geography is pretty brutal, there are, I think, 22 valleys (someone correct me) from Swansea to Pontypool with 3-400m tops or more and 200m floors. It just doesn’t lend itself to inter communication like the Jubilee line, or the Mildmay and its siblings.
What is fixable, and the cause of irritation, is that due to an apparent foul up when rebuilding Cardiff bus station ( 8 (!) years in the making) there isn’t enough bus stop capacity at the station, so loads of buses don’t go to it, meaning getting from one side of the Welsh capital to the other and back of an evening on public transport is in the “just forget it” category, and if you’re not a local, you’ll probably need a search party to find you, as you exhaust yourself pounding the streets mournfully seeking the correct bus stop.
The South Wales Metro is proceeding well: an (unusual?) success story for the Welsh Government/Transport For Wales. The YouTuber "Rail Focus" occasionally covers it. Here are some explainers from him
In fairness the link down to the Bay in Cardiff will make a big difference. It’s 30 years overdue since the whole thing down there was first done, but would’ve been so much better if it had been easier to get to. There’s also a 15kish arena being built down there which will clearly increase concert traffic too. So all good.
I just wish planners would start with the basic premise that people will use stuff and create a night time economy if the question “how do I get home at the end?” can be answered easily, which as yet is not the case in many parts of S Wales.
‘ 🚨NEW: An ex-Labour Mayor, Naheed Ejaz, has been jailed for three years for helping her 41-year-old son hide evidence after he raped a 15-year-old girl’
Some more information below. This is the sort of problem that is being forced out of the news and public consciousness by debates about anti-semitism and Israel. It's as if we have lost all sense of proportion, ignoring what's on our doorstep for debating something thousands of miles away.
Time to increase spending on courts and policing. Doing away with triple lock might help with the cost.
So why is Wales so different from Scotland? Longer time joined to England? Better appreciation of economic reality?
Well I think I’m right in saying that Welsh gdp per head is about 75% of the U.K. average. That’s about Slovakia/Portugal levels and is in itself before you took off back office U.K. jobs like the DVLA in Swansea, Companies House in Cardiff, Stats and Patent offices in Newport, the Army in Brecon, the RAF on Anglesey etc etc and the transfers to level benefits and pensions to U.K. levels. In other words it makes a full fat five years of Zack Polanski govt in Westminster look like a mild cold compared to bubonic plague.
And that’s before we get to the Euro/Sterling, EU/English single market questions.
Oddly the much healthier position of the Welsh language could provide a drag with latent suspicions that everyone would be made to convert ( wouldn’t happen in reality, but it’s a question that doesn’t even arise in Scotland given about 1% speak Gaelic).
Interestingly too about 30% of the population is not born in Wales ( overwhelmingly in England) and I’d guess two thirds of the population lives within an hour of the English border, so the obvious integration with England runs deeper than Scotland.
On your last point: Wales is better linked to England than it is to itself. It is much easier to get from North Wales to Liverpool and Manchester than it is to Cardiff. And from South Wales to Bristol and London than to Wrexham or Holyhead. This isn't really true of Scotland, which is a more coherent economic unit. That doesn't necessarily affect feelings of nationhood, but it probably does affect how people feel about going it alone as a country.
Yes I think that’s right. For example, Newport saw a 9% population increase at the last census, the biggest in Wales, with a considerable proportion likely being Bristolians seeing how much further the money goes there, whilst having toll free commuting travel these days across the Severn. Manchester is about 1 hr 15 from Wrexham too, whilst Cardiff is probably 5 hours from Holyhead.
Yet none of that is going to stop anyone equally draping themselves in a dragon to watch rugby or football be they in Cowbridge or Caersws.
Therein lies Plaid’s ultimate conundrum.
Well, Labour have failed in nearly thirty years of running Welsh government to improve transport links between North and South Wales, so I guess that would be an obvious place for Plaid to start.
It's geography. There's a bloody big hill in the middle of it. So traffic is routed around the coast.
Labour and then SNP in Scotland have had similar issues linking the north and south.
Yes there are lots of hills! However most of the north south connections, certainly from SE Wales to NE wales (or even Gwynedd) tend to go through Herefordshire/Shropshire either by road or rail because it’s quicker. Indeed it’s probable the beef on the bone ban ( remember that?) collapsed because Wales made it legal and there was a temporary situation where a butcher en route from Cardiff to Wrexham would be carrying illegal contraband on the A49 route through the Marches but perfectly within the law if they stuck to the A470. Could’ve made a latter day Ealing comedy out of that.
I had forgotten about that! What larks Lived for a while in Shropshire, nothing moves fast there.
The A5/A49/A466 link between North and South East Wales would be a very decent route but for an added 15 minutes due entirely to just one major blockage point. Hereford. If Hereford were in Wales it would have had a by-pass long ago, funded by the higher per capita public spending afforded to Wales under the immensely generous Barnett Formula. Maybe Plaid should stand in Herefordshire on a platform of annexing the county for Wales.
I’m told by locals that the Hereford bypass saga rivals the Newport M4 relief road.
Ironically SW Herefordshire was long regarded as part of Wales, it was ecclesiastically so for many a long year, Welsh was known to be spoken there into the second half of the 19th century, and to this day Dwr Cymru ( Welsh Water) have chunks of it as their patch . Maybe Plaid should stand on a reannexation, and Hereford bypass now platform(?)
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
Well I am a member so at least I get a say in things. But so - indirectly - do the wider electorate because my main criterion will be who (imo) is the person most able to impress in the job and hence deny the catastrophic Reform project the floating voters it needs over and above its ageing Leaver base to deliver power into the grubby mitts of Nigel Farage.
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
Starmer could do a Cameron and come out and resign first thing in the morning after the elections.
‘ 🚨NEW: An ex-Labour Mayor, Naheed Ejaz, has been jailed for three years for helping her 41-year-old son hide evidence after he raped a 15-year-old girl’
Some more information below. This is the sort of problem that is being forced out of the news and public consciousness by debates about anti-semitism and Israel. It's as if we have lost all sense of proportion, ignoring what's on our doorstep for debating something thousands of miles away.
Time to increase spending on courts and policing. Doing away with triple lock might help with the cost.
Cutting benefits for those who've never worked is a much better option than seeking to impoverish those who are often too old to work. The triple lock may need reform but it's no cure all.
So why is Wales so different from Scotland? Longer time joined to England? Better appreciation of economic reality?
Well I think I’m right in saying that Welsh gdp per head is about 75% of the U.K. average. That’s about Slovakia/Portugal levels and is in itself before you took off back office U.K. jobs like the DVLA in Swansea, Companies House in Cardiff, Stats and Patent offices in Newport, the Army in Brecon, the RAF on Anglesey etc etc and the transfers to level benefits and pensions to U.K. levels. In other words it makes a full fat five years of Zack Polanski govt in Westminster look like a mild cold compared to bubonic plague.
And that’s before we get to the Euro/Sterling, EU/English single market questions.
Oddly the much healthier position of the Welsh language could provide a drag with latent suspicions that everyone would be made to convert ( wouldn’t happen in reality, but it’s a question that doesn’t even arise in Scotland given about 1% speak Gaelic).
Interestingly too about 30% of the population is not born in Wales ( overwhelmingly in England) and I’d guess two thirds of the population lives within an hour of the English border, so the obvious integration with England runs deeper than Scotland.
On your last point: Wales is better linked to England than it is to itself. It is much easier to get from North Wales to Liverpool and Manchester than it is to Cardiff. And from South Wales to Bristol and London than to Wrexham or Holyhead. This isn't really true of Scotland, which is a more coherent economic unit. That doesn't necessarily affect feelings of nationhood, but it probably does affect how people feel about going it alone as a country.
Yes I think that’s right. For example, Newport saw a 9% population increase at the last census, the biggest in Wales, with a considerable proportion likely being Bristolians seeing how much further the money goes there, whilst having toll free commuting travel these days across the Severn. Manchester is about 1 hr 15 from Wrexham too, whilst Cardiff is probably 5 hours from Holyhead.
Yet none of that is going to stop anyone equally draping themselves in a dragon to watch rugby or football be they in Cowbridge or Caersws.
Therein lies Plaid’s ultimate conundrum.
Well, Labour have failed in nearly thirty years of running Welsh government to improve transport links between North and South Wales, so I guess that would be an obvious place for Plaid to start.
It's geography. There's a bloody big hill in the middle of it. So traffic is routed around the coast.
Labour and then SNP in Scotland have had similar issues linking the north and south.
Yes there are lots of hills! However most of the north south connections, certainly from SE Wales to NE wales (or even Gwynedd) tend to go through Herefordshire/Shropshire either by road or rail because it’s quicker. Indeed it’s probable the beef on the bone ban ( remember that?) collapsed because Wales made it legal and there was a temporary situation where a butcher en route from Cardiff to Wrexham would be carrying illegal contraband on the A49 route through the Marches but perfectly within the law if they stuck to the A470. Could’ve made a latter day Ealing comedy out of that.
I had forgotten about that! What larks Lived for a while in Shropshire, nothing moves fast there.
The A5/A49/A466 link between North and South East Wales would be a very decent route but for an added 15 minutes due entirely to just one major blockage point. Hereford. If Hereford were in Wales it would have had a by-pass long ago, funded by the higher per capita public spending afforded to Wales under the immensely generous Barnett Formula. Maybe Plaid should stand in Herefordshire on a platform of annexing the county for Wales.
I’m told by locals that the Hereford bypass saga rivals the Newport M4 relief road.
Ironically SW Herefordshire was long regarded as part of Wales, it was ecclesiastically so for many a long year, Welsh was known to be spoken there into the second half of the 19th century, and to this day Dwr Cymru ( Welsh Water) have chunks of it as their patch . Maybe Plaid should stand on a reannexation, and Hereford bypass now platform(?)
There's been very slightly more political pressure for the border around there to be moved in the opposite direction. The English Democrats have campaigned on holding a referendum in Monmouthshire over whether it should become part of England.
I’ve made pathetic progress today. I woke in an unusually lethargic mood. I couldn’t be bothered to get started, and only did when I realised that I only had an hour until I had to check out
Yesterday I’d walked ten miles by noon; today I’d only managed five. I was slightly delayed by having to cross the river Charentes by the ‘bridge’ pictured below. There is a little ‘bateau’, which doesn’t touch the water, suspended from the top
I did slightly better this afternoon, another ten miles. It started raining quite hard, and I was walking by quite a busy road, really not enjoying it. Then I realised that there was a canal path almost all the way to my destination, only about a quarter of a mile longer
I turned onto it and the sun came out. I’ve ended up in a lovely gite in a tiny town called Saint Just-Luzac. My gite is supposed to be a restaurant but it doesn’t seem to be open tonight. The bar/tabac/betting shop I’m currently boozing in doesn’t seem to sell any food except nuts
I just met an English guy who lives here; he tells me that the pizza restaurant half a mile away should be open. If not, I can survive on beer and nuts
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
Yes, it is Streetings best chance.
On the other hand he who wields the sword rarely wears the crown.
Labour Party approach to anti semitism after the latest attack on Jews from a, as reported in the press., British National
My proposal of what to do...
Ban Twitter. It's full of antisemitism. From the right, from the left.
Well, Elon did post "You have said the actual truth" in a reply to a Tweet saying that the Jews were engineering the mass migration of minorities to eliminate white people.
The bit I never really understood about this is why the Jews would be keen to import to lots of Muslims who hate them rather more -on average- than white people.
But then again, what do I know.
Because Islam was invented by Jews to control the world... is what I heard in a queue during the pandemic.
But yeah, if you want to do something about antisemitism, I'd start with a system run by an AntiSemite that is pumping this stuff into people's eyes.
Here we go again. Ban Twitter. You just can’t cope with a social medium run by someone who isn’t Woke and left and willing to censor all right wingers which is what you enjoyed for a decade. Now you lefties have to fuck off to Bluesky which turns out to be a nightmare of humourless pricks, because that’s what you are like on the left. Own it
You’re also factually wrong. By far the biggest source of anti semitic voices and memes online is TikTok. Which is also much bigger, specially with young people
So why is Wales so different from Scotland? Longer time joined to England? Better appreciation of economic reality?
Well I think I’m right in saying that Welsh gdp per head is about 75% of the U.K. average. That’s about Slovakia/Portugal levels and is in itself before you took off back office U.K. jobs like the DVLA in Swansea, Companies House in Cardiff, Stats and Patent offices in Newport, the Army in Brecon, the RAF on Anglesey etc etc and the transfers to level benefits and pensions to U.K. levels. In other words it makes a full fat five years of Zack Polanski govt in Westminster look like a mild cold compared to bubonic plague.
And that’s before we get to the Euro/Sterling, EU/English single market questions.
Oddly the much healthier position of the Welsh language could provide a drag with latent suspicions that everyone would be made to convert ( wouldn’t happen in reality, but it’s a question that doesn’t even arise in Scotland given about 1% speak Gaelic).
Interestingly too about 30% of the population is not born in Wales ( overwhelmingly in England) and I’d guess two thirds of the population lives within an hour of the English border, so the obvious integration with England runs deeper than Scotland.
On your last point: Wales is better linked to England than it is to itself. It is much easier to get from North Wales to Liverpool and Manchester than it is to Cardiff. And from South Wales to Bristol and London than to Wrexham or Holyhead. This isn't really true of Scotland, which is a more coherent economic unit. That doesn't necessarily affect feelings of nationhood, but it probably does affect how people feel about going it alone as a country.
Yes I think that’s right. For example, Newport saw a 9% population increase at the last census, the biggest in Wales, with a considerable proportion likely being Bristolians seeing how much further the money goes there, whilst having toll free commuting travel these days across the Severn. Manchester is about 1 hr 15 from Wrexham too, whilst Cardiff is probably 5 hours from Holyhead.
Yet none of that is going to stop anyone equally draping themselves in a dragon to watch rugby or football be they in Cowbridge or Caersws.
Therein lies Plaid’s ultimate conundrum.
Well, Labour have failed in nearly thirty years of running Welsh government to improve transport links between North and South Wales, so I guess that would be an obvious place for Plaid to start.
It's geography. There's a bloody big hill in the middle of it. So traffic is routed around the coast.
Labour and then SNP in Scotland have had similar issues linking the north and south.
Yes there are lots of hills! However most of the north south connections, certainly from SE Wales to NE wales (or even Gwynedd) tend to go through Herefordshire/Shropshire either by road or rail because it’s quicker. Indeed it’s probable the beef on the bone ban ( remember that?) collapsed because Wales made it legal and there was a temporary situation where a butcher en route from Cardiff to Wrexham would be carrying illegal contraband on the A49 route through the Marches but perfectly within the law if they stuck to the A470. Could’ve made a latter day Ealing comedy out of that.
I had forgotten about that! What larks Lived for a while in Shropshire, nothing moves fast there.
The A5/A49/A466 link between North and South East Wales would be a very decent route but for an added 15 minutes due entirely to just one major blockage point. Hereford. If Hereford were in Wales it would have had a by-pass long ago, funded by the higher per capita public spending afforded to Wales under the immensely generous Barnett Formula. Maybe Plaid should stand in Herefordshire on a platform of annexing the county for Wales.
I’m told by locals that the Hereford bypass saga rivals the Newport M4 relief road.
Ironically SW Herefordshire was long regarded as part of Wales, it was ecclesiastically so for many a long year, Welsh was known to be spoken there into the second half of the 19th century, and to this day Dwr Cymru ( Welsh Water) have chunks of it as their patch . Maybe Plaid should stand on a reannexation, and Hereford bypass now platform(?)
I had never heard that before.
Monmouth in my 1910 Encyclopedia was described as an "English County Town".
Almost the whole of Herefordshire even when it was part of the County of Hereford and Worcester I believe was a Welsh Water area. When I lived in Cradley (Herefordshire) we were just 10 miles from Worcester and still in Dwr Cymru. Malvern, 3 miles down the road was in Severn Trent land.
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
Yes, it is Streetings best chance.
On the other hand he who wields the sword rarely wears the crown.
The long standing rumours around the Cambridge student who, in the early 2000s, eager to join an exclusive student dining club, went out at night, set light to and burned down a pet shop in the town, to impress its members as to his ruthlessness and determination; a situation that had to be resolved by the wealthy father of one of the club members intervening with his wallet to avoid a scandal and career-limiting damage, continue to circulate on the internet. That shows how ruthless some Cantab students can be in pursuit of their ambitions; we just have to hope that Mr Streeting isn’t half as bad as that guy.
I’ve made pathetic progress today. I woke in an unusually lethargic mood. I couldn’t be bothered to get started, and only did when I realised that I only had an hour until I had to check out
Yesterday I’d walked ten miles by noon; today I’d only managed five. I was slightly delayed by having to cross the river Charentes by the ‘bridge’ pictured below. There is a little ‘bateau’, which doesn’t touch the water, suspended from the top
I did slightly better this afternoon, another ten miles. It started raining quite hard, and I was walking by quite a busy road, really not enjoying it. Then I realised that there was a canal path almost all the way to my destination, only about a quarter of a mile longer
I turned onto it and the sun came out. I’ve ended up in a lovely gite in a tiny town called Saint Just-Luzac. My gite is supposed to be a restaurant but it doesn’t seem to be open tonight. The bar/tabac/betting shop I’m currently boozing in doesn’t seem to sell any food except nuts
I just met an English guy who lives here; he tells me that the pizza restaurant half a mile away should be open. If not, I can survive on beer and nuts
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
Starmer could do a Cameron and come out and resign first thing in the morning after the elections.
Starmer isn't that smart, if he had any clue about political fallout he wouldn't have had that 3 line whip to protect his arse on Tuesday.
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
Starmer could do a Cameron and come out and resign first thing in the morning after the elections.
Starmer isn't that smart, if he had any clue about political fallout he wouldn't have had that 3 line whip to protect his arse on Tuesday.
Labour Party approach to anti semitism after the latest attack on Jews from a, as reported in the press., British National
My proposal of what to do...
Ban Twitter. It's full of antisemitism. From the right, from the left.
Well, Elon did post "You have said the actual truth" in a reply to a Tweet saying that the Jews were engineering the mass migration of minorities to eliminate white people.
The bit I never really understood about this is why the Jews would be keen to import to lots of Muslims who hate them rather more -on average- than white people.
But then again, what do I know.
Because Islam was invented by Jews to control the world... is what I heard in a queue during the pandemic.
But yeah, if you want to do something about antisemitism, I'd start with a system run by an AntiSemite that is pumping this stuff into people's eyes.
Here we go again. Ban Twitter. You just can’t cope with a social medium run by someone who isn’t Woke and left and willing to censor all right wingers which is what you enjoyed for a decade. Now you lefties have to fuck off to Bluesky which turns out to be a nightmare of humourless pricks, because that’s what you are like on the left. Own it
You’re also factually wrong. By far the biggest source of anti semitic voices and memes online is TikTok. Which is also much bigger, specially with young people
We should not ban it. But perhaps we could nationalise it or create a British equivalent? British attitudes towards free speech are schizophrenic, veering between freeing it and suppressing it from cause to cause and day to day without rhyme and reason. At least a British TikTok would force transparency and make it obvious when a thing is being silenced and when it is being freed.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
EXCL: Wes Streeting has the numbers and is ready to go should a leadership race kick off after locals, friends and allies of the Health Sec tell me
* They say he has the numbers in the PLP
* On the briefings that he is tainted by Mandelson, an ally says: ‘What rumour could be worse than a tax-dodger?’
If SKS goes this year I lose £££. But if it's Wes I win it all back plus more. Next year and Wes is my betting chuffed and over the moon. This year and not Wes is my gutted and sick as a parrot. Exciting book, I have.
Streeting's best chance is to go immediately after the locals, because Starmer will be holed below the waterline but the field of rival candidates will still be weakened. Burnham can't stand and Rayner who will probably run against him will be compromised should HMRC drag their heels. For the same reasons, a relative outsider (Cooper, Carns, Healey?) may be first in the ring.
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
Yes, it is Streetings best chance.
On the other hand he who wields the sword rarely wears the crown.
The long standing rumours around the Cambridge student who, in the early 2000s, eager to join an exclusive student dining club, went out at night, set light to and burned down a pet shop in the town, to impress its members as to his ruthlessness and determination; a situation that had to be resolved by the wealthy father of one of the club members intervening with his wallet to avoid a scandal and career-limiting damage, continue to circulate on the internet. That shows how ruthless some Cantab students can be in pursuit of their ambitions; we just have to hope that Mr Streeting isn’t half as bad as that guy.
I’ve made pathetic progress today. I woke in an unusually lethargic mood. I couldn’t be bothered to get started, and only did when I realised that I only had an hour until I had to check out
Yesterday I’d walked ten miles by noon; today I’d only managed five. I was slightly delayed by having to cross the river Charentes by the ‘bridge’ pictured below. There is a little ‘bateau’, which doesn’t touch the water, suspended from the top
I did slightly better this afternoon, another ten miles. It started raining quite hard, and I was walking by quite a busy road, really not enjoying it. Then I realised that there was a canal path almost all the way to my destination, only about a quarter of a mile longer
I turned onto it and the sun came out. I’ve ended up in a lovely gite in a tiny town called Saint Just-Luzac. My gite is supposed to be a restaurant but it doesn’t seem to be open tonight. The bar/tabac/betting shop I’m currently boozing in doesn’t seem to sell any food except nuts
I just met an English guy who lives here; he tells me that the pizza restaurant half a mile away should be open. If not, I can survive on beer and nuts
Last year in Täsch - a large village not a small one - on a Monday in touristy August - not only was the hotel restaurant closed but the all the other restaurants and takeaways and supermarket and station convenience store by 8pm. Not fancying heading back to Zermatt, we had chocolate chip cookies, red wine, and an early night. Luckily breakfast started at six.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
You look at that list and it is just frankly so depressing. The complete lack of competence, credibility, judgement, understanding, I could go on all day. Starmer is abysmal. And he's still better than any of the alternatives.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
This is total hairy bollocks
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
Of course - it's along list and I ran out of steam.
But
Lucy Powell - Who knew!? There's nothing about her that screams success. Cooper - Hard to argue against, but hard to like.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
You look at that list and it is just frankly so depressing. The complete lack of competence, credibility, judgement, understanding, I could go on all day. Starmer is abysmal. And he's still better than any of the alternatives.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
You look at that list and it is just frankly so depressing. The complete lack of competence, credibility, judgement, understanding, I could go on all day. Starmer is abysmal. And he's still better than any of the alternatives.
And even once you extend the shortlist to other parties...
Farage and Polanski are different versions of terrible. Badenoch just isn't up to it. Ed Davey isn't trying to be PM- the Lib Dems have a 100 seats at most strategy which works for them but isn't the damn point.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
This is total hairy bollocks
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
This is total hairy bollocks
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
You’re making the mistake of retro-applying the title later historians have ascribed to it. Best translated, that work was titled ‘ The ecclesiastical history of our island and nation, in five books’.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
Of course - it's along list and I ran out of steam.
But
Lucy Powell - Who knew!? There's nothing about her that screams success. Cooper - Hard to argue against, but hard to like.
I'll give a shout out for Mahmood. However, the hand-wringing, virtue-signalling membership appear to despise her.
Wow, in a very unusual step the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has sent a blistering letter to Green Party leader Zack Polanski saying he shouldn’t be retweeting “armchair critics” who criticised officers for kicking the Golders Green attacker in the head.
It's extraordinary that he should take such a step so close to an election. I can only imagine that they're seriously worried about the potential for disorder if the story that Polanski reposted were to gain traction.
Polanski has got it wrong here, and it’s clearly a public order issue, but I think it’s deeply inappropriate for a senior police officer to make such a direct, public and personal intervention in politics.
A broad statement warning everyone not to make inflammatory and incorrect statements would suffice. And frankly it would be a bit rich coming from the Met given their record - should have left it to senior members of the government.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
Of course - it's along list and I ran out of steam.
But
Lucy Powell - Who knew!? There's nothing about her that screams success. Cooper - Hard to argue against, but hard to like.
I'll give a shout out for Mahmood. However, the hand-wringing, virtue-signalling membership appear to despise her.
Oh FFS yes, obviously Mahmood. I wasn't trying to be exhaustive in this but it's getting exhausting
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
Of course - it's along list and I ran out of steam.
But
Lucy Powell - Who knew!? There's nothing about her that screams success. Cooper - Hard to argue against, but hard to like.
I'll give a shout out for Mahmood. However, the hand-wringing, virtue-signalling membership appear to despise her.
Oh FFS yes, obviously Mahmood. I wasn't trying to be exhaustive in this but it's getting exhausting
Reeves- OK, Chancellor ought to get an interview for the job, but yeah, not happening. Lammy- really should be on the shortlist, but isn't.
Since Cameron, maybe since Blair, we have either had well-meaning semi-entities crushed by the job (that's more sneery than I really want to be, a semi-entity is a honourable thing to be- but think May/Sunak/Starmer) or shysters who forced themselves to the top by pure ambition (Johnson/Truss/maybe Brown). I don't see that changing for a while, unfortunately.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
You look at that list and it is just frankly so depressing. The complete lack of competence, credibility, judgement, understanding, I could go on all day. Starmer is abysmal. And he's still better than any of the alternatives.
And even once you extend the shortlist to other parties...
Farage and Polanski are different versions of terrible. Badenoch just isn't up to it. Ed Davey isn't trying to be PM- the Lib Dems have a 100 seats at most strategy which works for them but isn't the damn point.
Its a truly terrible time in our politics. I am 64 and I cannot remember a time like it. As a child we had Wilson, one of the youngest Oxford dons, a genuinely brilliant man. Healey, Roy Mason, even Foot, these were men of genuine talent, skills and passion. Thatcher's government was incredible by today's standards. Howe, Whitelaw, Carrington, Lawson, Pym, even Heseltine, a government of genuine talent. Blair and Brown, not my taste, especially the latter but gifted, Blair especially. The Coalition, Cameron, Osborne, Clegg. Serious people doing a serious job to the best of their ability.
No one is going to agree with everyone on that list and what they did, hell, I don't. But we had leadership and a sense of purpose. Now, in every party, we seem to have people whose primary goal is to be PM. Just for their own egos. With no idea what they want this country to be, how to improve the lives of those that live here, no clear plan at all. It's tragic.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
You look at that list and it is just frankly so depressing. The complete lack of competence, credibility, judgement, understanding, I could go on all day. Starmer is abysmal. And he's still better than any of the alternatives.
And even once you extend the shortlist to other parties...
Farage and Polanski are different versions of terrible. Badenoch just isn't up to it. Ed Davey isn't trying to be PM- the Lib Dems have a 100 seats at most strategy which works for them but isn't the damn point.
Its a truly terrible time in our politics. I am 64 and I cannot remember a time like it. As a child we had Wilson, one of the youngest Oxford dons, a genuinely brilliant man. Healey, Roy Mason, even Foot, these were men of genuine talent, skills and passion. Thatcher's government was incredible by today's standards. Howe, Whitelaw, Carrington, Lawson, Pym, even Heseltine, a government of genuine talent. Blair and Brown, not my taste, especially the latter but gifted, Blair especially. The Coalition, Cameron, Osborne, Clegg. Serious people doing a serious job to the best of their ability.
No one is going to agree with everyone on that list and what they did, hell, I don't. But we had leadership and a sense of purpose. Now, in every party, we seem to have people whose primary goal is to be PM. Just for their own egos. With no idea what they want this country to be, how to improve the lives of those that live here, no clear plan at all. It's tragic.
It's the Plato thing: One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Why anyone really brilliant of goodwill (those people definitely exist) should enter politics right now kinda escapes me. You can't get much done, and you will get unspeakable bodily fluids thrown at you by idiots. We're a week before the local elections, and next week a huge number of good people who have served their communites well will be chucked out and replaced by nitwits, all because they don't wear a fashionable rosette.
That's always been the way, but it feels worse now.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
He's my dark horse pick, I think. Before he was moved to his newly created post, I think he was the number two in the Treasury, so he's a possible candidate to replace Reeves if Starmer sacrifices his chancellor in a post local election reshuffle.
Then he's in place to become PM if the contest is later than next month.
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
This is total hairy bollocks
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
Nope. It was never perceived as a single nation until well into the 9th century and probably the early 10th. Offa in the late 8th century does not refer to himself as King of England, only Mercia. The first King to refer to himself as King of the English (Rex Anglorum) was Athelstan as LostPassword said earlier.
Alfred issued what he intended to be the first unified coinage system in England in 886 AD but at the time the Eastern part of England was still under Danelaw so there was no unified England at that point.
The first person to be crowned King of a unified England was even later than Athelstan - Edgar in 973 AD
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
This is total hairy bollocks
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
But as a unified Kingdom?
What is “unified”? What is “kingdom”
There’s “I call myself High King “I call myself High King, and no one laughs” “Others call me High King” Etc…
Paying taxes and not having your own armies is a long way down that road.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good. Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days. Peter Kyle - Sneaky! Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way. Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies. Dougie - I simply don't get this one. Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway. Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote. Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach. John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great. Stephen Kinnock - He just won't. Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
I think that you have to add Powell as she is deputy leader, and that must count for something, and Cooper.
You look at that list and it is just frankly so depressing. The complete lack of competence, credibility, judgement, understanding, I could go on all day. Starmer is abysmal. And he's still better than any of the alternatives.
And even once you extend the shortlist to other parties...
Farage and Polanski are different versions of terrible. Badenoch just isn't up to it. Ed Davey isn't trying to be PM- the Lib Dems have a 100 seats at most strategy which works for them but isn't the damn point.
Its a truly terrible time in our politics. I am 64 and I cannot remember a time like it. As a child we had Wilson, one of the youngest Oxford dons, a genuinely brilliant man. Healey, Roy Mason, even Foot, these were men of genuine talent, skills and passion. Thatcher's government was incredible by today's standards. Howe, Whitelaw, Carrington, Lawson, Pym, even Heseltine, a government of genuine talent. Blair and Brown, not my taste, especially the latter but gifted, Blair especially. The Coalition, Cameron, Osborne, Clegg. Serious people doing a serious job to the best of their ability.
No one is going to agree with everyone on that list and what they did, hell, I don't. But we had leadership and a sense of purpose. Now, in every party, we seem to have people whose primary goal is to be PM. Just for their own egos. With no idea what they want this country to be, how to improve the lives of those that live here, no clear plan at all. It's tragic.
Yup
It’s been so long since you looked at the Cabinet and said “half a dozen of those could be PM”
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
This is total hairy bollocks
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
Nope. It was never perceived as a single nation until well into the 9th century and probably the early 10th. Offa in the late 8th century does not refer to himself as King of England, only Mercia. The first King to refer to himself as King of the English (Rex Anglorum) was Athelstan as LostPassword said earlier.
Alfred issued what he intended to be the first unified coinage system in England in 886 AD but at the time the Eastern part of England was still under Danelaw so there was no unified England at that point.
The first person to be crowned King of a unified England was even later than Athelstan - Edgar in 973 AD
Not sure I agree
You are correct that was when the single country named England with its approximate current boundaries came into being.
But kingdoms are organic - “England” was just a political figleaf to hide what was really a Greater Wessex. And that had been an extant kingdom for hundreds of years
What exactly is the government supposed to do re anti-Semitism?
Unless you ban the internet and bring in the thought police! And it was pretty disgraceful to have a crowd calling Starmer a traitor for not being able to stop a problem which is impossible to stop .
They can use the bully pulpit of office to be very clear that anti-Semitism is unacceptable and make sure that the police enforce this by arresting those with anti-Semetic signs and slogans at the various protests. In fairness, I thought the Home Secretary was good about that this morning on Today but it needs consistent messaging and action, not some soft words in the face of a particular tragedy. Too many in Labour are more concerned with winning back the votes of the Muslim population than they are about right and wrong.
I have been very critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, the West Bank and now Iran. But genocidal policies by the Israeli government is no excuse for anti-Sematism here. This isn't complicated and we need to be clear and loud about it.
I am in most of my views leftish-liberal, but I really despair at the equivocations around antisemitism from so many on the left. If you can't condemn antisemitism without some mealy-mouthed qualification concerning Israel and Zionism, frankly I don't give any credence to your claims to be an anti-racist.
Critisise “The government of Israel” or “Netanyahu and his supporters”, absolutely fair.
As soon as people start talking about “Zionism”, it’s plainly clear to most normies what they actually mean.
The problem with limiting criticisms to the “The government of Israel” and “Netanyahu and his supporters" is that they have over time moulded the State of Israel in their image. Palestians living in what is legally Israel now have massively inferior rights to those of Jews, in what shorn of its religious veneer is effectively a racist state. Even worse is the plight of Palestinians in the territories that Israel is quite content to occupy in a perpetual limbo, what would have been the bantustans of South Africa representing a very real parallel with the occupied territories today, the planned culmination of apartheid that South Africa eventually turned its back on. Israel, the state, has effectively permanently suppered the creation of a parallel Palestinian state. So criticism of the State of Israel itself should be quite legitimate, because of what it has turned into during the 30 years following Rabin's assassination.
It's also of relevance that a majority of Israelis seem to be quite content with this tyrannical state of affairs, tyranny but not even of the majority given that they are in a minority over the territories Israel occupies. The fact that they are Jews does not render criticism of their collective support for their government's actions as anti-semitic, even though Israel and its supporters repeatedly try to play that card.
Israel is quite literally a racist state. That’s the whole point of it. Israel is either a racist state or it is nothing.
It’s a western liberal obsession that every nation must be a multicultural paradise but the whole point of Israel is to be a self haven for jews.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be waging war on its neighbours, oppressing minorities or committing war crimes, which they are, but if Israel wasn’t racist then it wouldn’t be Israel.
I suppose a racist state based on a fairy story concocted by some stoned goat herders 3000 years ago is bound to be somewhat incoherent.
But enough about Scotland…
You English will never get over Scotland being the older country.
I wasn't aware of the precise date, I assume they are fairly close, within a century.
It rapidly falls into definitions of what is a “country”, what is a “nation” and when they happened. The neat numbers you see in the simpler history books for such things rarely make sense as absolutes.
Yes. So the traditional date for England is 927, when Athelstan conquers York, and, I believe, calls himself King of England. But earlier Kings of Wessex had called themselves King of the Anglo-Saxons, so if you wanted to you could probably push it back to Alfred the Great (so 871 or 886?)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The 927 anniversary is next year, 1100 years. For an exact dat,, the submissions to Athelstan as King of England, the Treaty of Eamont Bridge - to this day just south of Penrith - was signed on 12th July 927. Which ought to be an English bank holiday.
This is total hairy bollocks
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
Nope. It was never perceived as a single nation until well into the 9th century and probably the early 10th. Offa in the late 8th century does not refer to himself as King of England, only Mercia. The first King to refer to himself as King of the English (Rex Anglorum) was Athelstan as LostPassword said earlier.
Alfred issued what he intended to be the first unified coinage system in England in 886 AD but at the time the Eastern part of England was still under Danelaw so there was no unified England at that point.
The first person to be crowned King of a unified England was even later than Athelstan - Edgar in 973 AD
Not sure I agree
You are correct that was when the single country named England with its approximate current boundaries came into being.
But kingdoms are organic - “England” was just a political figleaf to hide what was really a Greater Wessex. And that had been an extant kingdom for hundreds of years
Er no. It was one of a number of Kingdoms existing side by side and often at war with each other.
If a single European state ever comes into existence you wouldn't date its founding from Napoleon's time. It would be patent nonsense.
Northumbria was an independent kIngdom until 867 East Anglia was an independent Kingdom until 869 Mercia was an independent Kingdom until 879
All of these fell because of the Danes and then remained under Danish control to agreater or lesser degree until the early 10th century.
Wessex tried very hard to gain control of its neighbours but it didn't succeed until after the end of Danelaw. And even Wessex wasn't a stable kingdom until Ecgberht in the early 9th century
The idea there was a single political entity called England before Athelstan simply isn't true.
Comments
‘ He said he had "decided not to punish" the defendants, and handed the trio each a 12-month conditional discharge.’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68286945
Patrick De Haan
@GasBuddyGuy
·
2h
Every. Single. State. Has higher gas prices today compared to a week ago. Biggest jumps:
IN +84c/gal (yes, 84 cents in a WEEK)
MI +72c/gal
OH +60c/gal
IL +39c/gal
NM +37c/gal
https://x.com/GasBuddyGuy/status/2049842937140261263
Labour would bite your hand off for that result.
In criminal law sentencing it means a minimum sentence (usually), but no fixed or defined maximum.
The purpose is supposedly public protection, and the duration of the sentence is linked to that. The system (like most of the criminal justice system) is under-resourced, and fallible.
There should of course be a public inquiry into his case over the past decade and a half, but we all know already what the outcome would be, and that the lessons would not in practice be learned.
Also England came into existence 32 years, 6 month, 14 days, 4 hours, 32 minutes, 18 seconds and 11 yoctoseconds before Scotland. It was a busy Thursday.
None of this is anti-semitism, any more than it's anti-American to say that President Trump appears to be bonkers, while remaining friendly to Americans in general.
We've run up against a lot of that in the Mobility Aids consultation, and specifically around external limitations imposed on disabled people which are not imposed on their able-bodied equivalents.
One is inherited from the old invalid carriages being limited to one person (remember the light blue Invacars). Do we think that disabled people do not have families, partners and children? The consultation had a hard-wired assumption around "should a mobility aid be able to carry a passenger" (ie one passenger)?
What is a disabled parent with 2 small kids to get to school supposed to do if they have no driving license or car, or don't want one? Yet if cycling they could put 2 kids in a trailer, but a mobility scooter or powerchair is not allowed a trailer. There are already 4 seater cycles on the market.
But we have actual law (Mental Capacity Act 2005) that says assumptions about people's ability to make decisions should not be made without a specific medical finding.
Our law and culture are full of such unlawful assumptions.
His 2024 majority is only 528...
But yeah, if you want to do something about antisemitism, I'd start with a system run by an AntiSemite that is pumping this stuff into people's eyes.
From what I read Keir Starmer definitely is/isn’t safe from a challenge which definitely is/isn’t going to come from Angela Rayner who definitely is/isn’t going to call for him to go/accept a job in a reshuffle that definitely is/isn’t happening because she is worried Wes Streeting definitely is/isn’t about to launch a challenge of his own to head off Andy Burnham who definitely is/isn’t in a pact with a Labour MP to take a Commons seat. Hope that’s clear
https://x.com/TheGreenParty/status/2049881627409465491
Ohio was already flagged up as a problem for the Dems.
https://news.sky.com/story/nigel-farage-sang-antisemitic-songs-to-jewish-classmates-former-dulwich-pupil-claims-13479621
https://greenparty.org.uk/2026/04/29/greens-respond-to-golders-green-antisemitic-attacks/
And yesterday:
https://bsky.app/profile/zackpolanski.bsky.social/post/3mkn4olppcs2p
https://bsky.app/profile/mothinali.bsky.social/post/3mkn5nbmeas2e
As kicking off in May is optimal for a number of candidates, at least one seems bound to initiate a contest then. Even if some have relatively little chance of getting 80 nominations, it will force the favourites to join in.
Regardless, I would still expect Rayner to win an immediate contest, or otherwise Miliband if Rayner chooses not to run. Streeting will get the necessary nominations from MPs but it's the members who will decide things.
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
Probably a hold, but far from impossible for Sherrod to win. He did, after all, hold the state in 2018 at the last Senate midterms, and he outperformed Harris by a pretty large margin in 2024.
HACKER: So your best excuse is that an indefinite sentence is one where we don't have a clue if they're in prison or not?
BERNARD: Yes, Minister.
(Theme tune that isn't the one from To The Manor Born)
The traditional date for Scotland is 843, but at the time Kenneth MacAlpin called himself the King of the Picts and it wasn't until Donald II in 889 that they called themselves King of Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland; Scotland being a later name derived from Latin when that was en vogue.)
But, of course, all of these rulers would have asserted their right to rule from their lineage to almost mythical roots, hundreds of years earlier.
But yes, Scotland is 84 years older than England by the most commonly used dates. And Scotland was only 91 years old when its King was first forced to submit to an English King, England only having existed for 7 years by that point.
The raised threat level means an attack is highly likely in the next six months, the government says.
Wow, in a very unusual step the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has sent a blistering letter to Green Party leader Zack Polanski saying he shouldn’t be retweeting “armchair critics” who criticised officers for kicking the Golders Green attacker in the head.
‘ 🚨NEW: An ex-Labour Mayor, Naheed Ejaz, has been jailed for three years for helping her 41-year-old son hide evidence after he raped a 15-year-old girl’
https://x.com/gbpolitcs/status/2049881737220559117?s=61
I just wish planners would start with the basic premise that people will use stuff and create a night time economy if the question “how do I get home at the end?” can be answered easily, which as yet is not the case in many parts of S Wales.
Time to increase spending on courts and policing. Doing away with triple lock might help with the cost.
https://www.bracknell-forest.gov.uk/news/2026/04/sentencing-former-mayor-and-mayoral-consort
Ironically SW Herefordshire was long regarded as part of Wales, it was ecclesiastically so for many a long year, Welsh was known to be spoken there into the second half of the 19th century, and to this day Dwr Cymru ( Welsh Water) have chunks of it as their patch . Maybe Plaid should stand on a reannexation, and Hereford bypass now platform(?)
Yesterday I’d walked ten miles by noon; today I’d only managed five. I was slightly delayed by having to cross the river Charentes by the ‘bridge’ pictured below. There is a little ‘bateau’, which doesn’t touch the water, suspended from the top
I did slightly better this afternoon, another ten miles. It started raining quite hard, and I was walking by quite a busy road, really not enjoying it. Then I realised that there was a canal path almost all the way to my destination, only about a quarter of a mile longer
I turned onto it and the sun came out. I’ve ended up in a lovely gite in a tiny town called Saint Just-Luzac. My gite is supposed to be a restaurant but it doesn’t seem to be open tonight. The bar/tabac/betting shop I’m currently boozing in doesn’t seem to sell any food except nuts
I just met an English guy who lives here; he tells me that the pizza restaurant half a mile away should be open. If not, I can survive on beer and nuts
On the other hand he who wields the sword rarely wears the crown.
You’re also factually wrong. By far the biggest source of anti semitic voices and memes online is TikTok. Which is also much bigger, specially with young people
Are you trying to ban TikTok?
Monmouth in my 1910 Encyclopedia was described as an "English County Town".
Almost the whole of Herefordshire even when it was part of the County of Hereford and Worcester I believe was a Welsh Water area. When I lived in Cradley (Herefordshire) we were just 10 miles from Worcester and still in Dwr Cymru. Malvern, 3 miles down the road was in Severn Trent land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_United_States#:~:text=In 2020, President Donald Trump,reversed the order in 2021.
We should not ban it. But perhaps we could nationalise it or create a British equivalent? British attitudes towards free speech are schizophrenic, veering between freeing it and suppressing it from cause to cause and day to day without rhyme and reason. At least a British TikTok would force transparency and make it obvious when a thing is being silenced and when it is being freed.
Replacing SKS seems to be much like the Grand National - many riders, many fallers. The small shortlist (Burnham, Miliband, Streeting, Rayner) are joined by a load of possibles.
I'd be very interested to hear thoughts as to whether these outsiders could somehow find themselves projected into an office that they didn't seek, but were hardly likely to turn down if called upon. (I'll add some of my thoughts first)
Thornberry - She's a bit ghastly, but she can also be very good.
Darren Jones - He's front and centre as to knowing what's going on these days.
Peter Kyle - Sneaky!
Bridget Philipson - Once spoken of in hushed tones in a good way, now the other way.
Hilary Benn - It'd make his father proud until his father saw his policies.
Dougie - I simply don't get this one.
Lisa Nandy - she's given up I think anyway.
Alistair Carns - he gets his own vote.
Louise Haigh - a woman scorned. Do not approach.
John Healey - as Healey's go he's not great.
Stephen Kinnock - He just won't.
Miatta Fahnbulleh - Hahahahahaha. (I just include her because she seems to have backers)
Perhaps 3, 5 or more reactors are now potentially going to be saved and restarted. Decommissioning work may be stopped immediately.
https://x.com/energybants/status/2049732718708039723
The Venerable Bede wrote his History of the English People in 731 AD. So the English as nation had been around long enough to need a history in the 730s
England as a self perceived nation probably goes back to the 6th century. It is far older than Scotland
But
Lucy Powell - Who knew!? There's nothing about her that screams success.
Cooper - Hard to argue against, but hard to like.
Farage and Polanski are different versions of terrible.
Badenoch just isn't up to it.
Ed Davey isn't trying to be PM- the Lib Dems have a 100 seats at most strategy which works for them but isn't the damn point.
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp...
A broad statement warning everyone not to make inflammatory and incorrect statements would suffice. And frankly it would be a bit rich coming from the Met given their record - should have left it to senior members of the government.
NEW THREAD
Lammy- really should be on the shortlist, but isn't.
Since Cameron, maybe since Blair, we have either had well-meaning semi-entities crushed by the job (that's more sneery than I really want to be, a semi-entity is a honourable thing to be- but think May/Sunak/Starmer) or shysters who forced themselves to the top by pure ambition (Johnson/Truss/maybe Brown). I don't see that changing for a while, unfortunately.
No one is going to agree with everyone on that list and what they did, hell, I don't. But we had leadership and a sense of purpose. Now, in every party, we seem to have people whose primary goal is to be PM. Just for their own egos. With no idea what they want this country to be, how to improve the lives of those that live here, no clear plan at all. It's tragic.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Why anyone really brilliant of goodwill (those people definitely exist) should enter politics right now kinda escapes me. You can't get much done, and you will get unspeakable bodily fluids thrown at you by idiots. We're a week before the local elections, and next week a huge number of good people who have served their communites well will be chucked out and replaced by nitwits, all because they don't wear a fashionable rosette.
That's always been the way, but it feels worse now.
Then he's in place to become PM if the contest is later than next month.
Alfred issued what he intended to be the first unified coinage system in England in 886 AD but at the time the Eastern part of England was still under Danelaw so there was no unified England at that point.
The first person to be crowned King of a unified England was even later than Athelstan - Edgar in 973 AD
There’s “I call myself High King
“I call myself High King, and no one laughs”
“Others call me High King”
Etc…
Paying taxes and not having your own armies is a long way down that road.
It’s been so long since you looked at the Cabinet and said “half a dozen of those could be PM”
You are correct that was when the single country named England with its approximate current boundaries came into being.
But kingdoms are organic - “England” was just a political figleaf to hide what was really a Greater Wessex. And that had been an extant kingdom for hundreds of years
If a single European state ever comes into existence you wouldn't date its founding from Napoleon's time. It would be patent nonsense.
Northumbria was an independent kIngdom until 867
East Anglia was an independent Kingdom until 869
Mercia was an independent Kingdom until 879
All of these fell because of the Danes and then remained under Danish control to agreater or lesser degree until the early 10th century.
Wessex tried very hard to gain control of its neighbours but it didn't succeed until after the end of Danelaw. And even Wessex wasn't a stable kingdom until Ecgberht in the early 9th century
The idea there was a single political entity called England before Athelstan simply isn't true.