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Many Tories seem to think that, however bad their problems, they are as nothing compared to the complaints about bullying and anti-Semitism so widely canvassed by ex-Labour MPs this week. They have yet to be accused of racism by tearful MPs, the polls appear to put them in a small lead and once Brexit is sorted they can get back to doing what they do best, or so the hope appears to be. (Though whether a party which claims to have learnt the lessons of the dementia tax proposal thinks that rushing through without proper debate death taxes by way of large increases in probate fees has really learnt those lessons is perhaps for another time.)
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https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/nine-more-mps-set-quit-14043694
The naked women adorning Britain's churches.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-45116614 Officially the most surreal diversion ever on PB. Weve heard about the ERG backtracking before. I won't believe it unless the DUP switch first to give them cover.
I'm not as certain about both May and Corbyn not even attempting to persuade people because they are leader and that is that (incidentally that was essentially a criticism I had with the character Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica, who often opined that you don't need to explain yourself as president, but I digress) or whether they really do think they are trying they are just utterly hopeless at it and don't understand why.
The most vital point for me is that what is going on is not normal broad church politics. Whether one likes them or not is thank the tiggers for making that clear through the sheer drama and unusual situation that is multiple defections. The most vital problem though is the demand for purity. It's utterly bonkers yet very popular and neither side is strong enough or willing enough to fight.
Hence, we are screwed .
I'm not as certain about both May and Corbyn not even attempting to persuade people because they are leader and that is that (incidentally that was essentially a criticism I had with the character Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica, who often opined that you don't need to explain yourself as president, but I digress) or whether they really do think they are trying they are just utterly hopeless at it and don't understand why.
The most vital point for me is that what is going on is not normal broad church politics. Whether one likes them or not is thank the tiggers for making that clear through the sheer drama and unusual situation that is multiple defections.
The most vital problem though is the demand for purity. It's utterly bonkers yet very popular and neither side is strong enough or willing enough to fight it. The most numerous demanders of purity win. This demand also explains why every time someone is rumoured to be conceding something they swiftly reassert their purity and nothing changes. The DUP, ERG, Grievers, May, Corbyn, Lab Remainers even in fairness the Tiggers, they aren't bending.
Hence, we are screwed .
Joking aide, such are the depths of depravity that many Labour supporters have sunk into.
Please forgive me for going off-topic so early in a thread, but for anyone interested in naval history, then there is a rather excellent YouTube channel by Drachinfel that is well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/user/Drachinifel
In particular, his recent video on the CSS Virginia versus the USS Monitor makes me think of May versus Corbyn: two hastily-assembled vessels, applied with thick armour skin, with puny, unsuitable weapons that just bounce off each other. After their one battle neither lasted long, with one being blown up by its own side, and the other, which was totally unsuited for life at sea, foundering.
Now, which one is May, and which one is Corbyn...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28vougAE7LM
Your mother must be so proud.
The reason why many on the centre-left opposed Corbyn from the get-go was that he had stood in solidarity with anti-Semites and all anti-Western regimes and causes, however murderous, for decades. You can argue about economic policy, but ultimately some things are just beyond the pale. His past is what has always made him unfit to lead.
As for the Tories, their UKIPification is a surprise. I always thought they were pragmatic and certainly pro-business. It turns out they’re largely hard right English nationalists at grassroots level and as intolerant of dissent as their Labour contemporaries.
Whatever happens in the coming weeks will be ugly.
Excepting the next F1 test and first race of the season, although the start time of the Australian Grand Prix might be a bit irksome.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labour-breakaway-chuka-umunna-vows-14043341
The new, kinder politics is dead then? Guess we have to blame shoddy workmanship from Corbyn....
https://twitter.com/sazmeister88/status/1099438078131879936
That's OK then.
Lets not be too hasty to judge..The TIGS haven't done anything yet. Labour has lots of evidence to indicate anti-Semitism within the party.
Luciana Berger was born in Wembley and went to Haberdashers Aske, then Univ. of Birmingham. She has no connection with Liverpool Wavertree.
Nick Boles seems to have spent most of life in London, went to Winchester College, then Oxford Univ. He has no connection with Grantham and Stamford.
These MPs should quite properly be deselected, as they are not at all representative of their constituencies.
They might be suitable as London MPs.
London is already grotesquely fat with its self-importance. We don't need endless MPs from London representing Liverpool or East of England.
Record employment
Record levels of economic activity
Record vacancies
Record lows in women's unemployment
A rapidly falling deficit
Modest and probably under recorded growth
Very low inflation
Rising real wages (again almost certainly under-recording total increased earnings by the self employed)
A rapidly increasing number of house builds.
A housing market dominated by first time buyers for the first time since 1995.
It's almost as if having our political class obsessed with something of peripheral importance to the real world and less inclined to interfere in ordinary life is proving beneficial. Despite all the screams of doom and earnest forecasts of imminent disaster things are actually going rather well, in fact very well. So I think @Cyclefree's piece is overstated.
Thankfully few things in the UK are as bad as our politics. We seem to have collected our most incompetent and inept individuals and put them in a rather curious home in Westminster where they can do less damage than they might if allowed out into the community at large. We get a distorted view on this site because we bother listening to their utterings. Most sensible people tuned them out a long time ago.
Nato troops have been persuaded to abandon their posts and reveal sensitive details about military manoeuvres in a clandestine social media operation
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/23/catfishing-con-catches-nato-troops-report-reveals/
Some F1 specials up, none of which tempt me. The extra Drivers' market (winner without the top three teams/six drivers) has gone, which is a shame. Maybe it'll make a return.
REVEALED: Turkey seeks free trade deal with Britain in exchange for freedom of movement
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/763220/Turkey-Theresa-May-free-trade-deal-UK-freedom-movement
You are a tribal fool; the sort who will sit back and let evil happen if it is being done by 'your' team.
But agree, it was patchy, the tone not right, and ultimately felt cartoonish.
On tuition fees our politicians have doubled down on failure by increasing the interest rate so that they could sell the book debt at a better price, almost like a medieval policy of selling indulgences. It is going to be a very expensive mess to clean up.
PFI has many similar features. A short term way of solving a problem with long term adverse economic consequences. It's a classical political failing but I wouldn't call it pragmatic. Dishonest is more like it.
"Austerity" has, to the extent that we ever applied it, worked rather well and the last 2 budgets have eased many of the pressures inevitably created. There is money to do the same again this year and I have no doubt we will.
Labour. The party that historically has positioned itself to strive for equality, to stand up for those the system puts down. Now it stands alone in this country for its vileness for putting people down. Quite an achievement, in such a short time.
On topic, at least the Tories have an excuse for bending themselves all out of shape. Europe. They are arguing over trying to implement a decision of the voters. The most difficult to implement that we have known. Some consider it was a clear-cut binary choice that allows no options. Question: light switched on? Or light switched off? The voters went with light switched off. However, we have a political class scared of the dark. They want to keep the lights on. The PM has effectively said "How about we install dimmers?" It's a mess, but it has to be addressed. Democracy requires it.
Labour - you have no excuse whatsoever. None. Nobody has said "Israel - we have to address Israel, and make ourselves anti-semitic in the process, to show how serious we are about Israel." No. No. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.....
Labour, just crawl away and die under a hedge. It really would be best for all. Especially for those previously sane souls who now go about provoking ridicule as they try to justify the morally unjustifiable. Just stop it. At some point, in the nearish future, you are going to stand back and mutter to yourself "What the F*CK was I thinking?"
It leads to certain demographics being wildly over-represented in Parliament, which is very bad.
Part of the problem with Brexit is that Parliament has a substantial Remain majority, yet the Referendum showed that Leave were in the majority. Whether or not recent polls are to be believed, it is still true that Parliament is wildly out-of-kilter with the country, being way too Remainer-y.
Another problem is solidly working class areas (like Liverpool Wavertree) end up being represented by Luciana from Haberdashers Aske. The under-representation of the working class in Parliament is another significant driver of our problems.
It is actually extremely important that Parliament is representative, of minorities, of Welsh and Scots, of the working classes, of Northerners and so on. (The ridiculous parachuting of outside candidates into Welsh constituencies still goes on -- let' s see who gets put forward for the Newport West by-election, for instance).
I strongly support the idea that black and minority ethnic candidates need to be properly represented, especially in constituencies in which they are dominant. It just needs to go much further.
Boles would have been a good Tory candidate for Hove. He stood twice for Remainer-y Hove and lost. He's a failure -- who could only get into Parliament representing a seat for which he has no emotional connection. He should be booted out. So should Luciana.
In addition, I'd make it so if someone moved out of that criteria, they were automatically no longer a councillor or MP (health and other issues excepted). This latter clause may stop the following farcical situation:
https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/councillor-living-scotland-quits-one-15843914
The other path had 14 million different paths running of it all resulting in being outside the EU but all with very different end points. The other problem with the none-EU path is that it seems to not have been properly mapped and there is an unavoidable swamp pit full of alligators before we get to the second crosswords that does seem to have 15 different unmapped paths running from it.
Of course, we're Brexiting because of PR.
It was the crucial change of PR for European elections that led to the growth of UKIP. It provided the money, paid positions and resources for UKIP to swell into a monster.
But, as the referendum shows, it was more democratic.
if the politicos werent so obsessed this govt would have some economic good news to feed in to the cycle. For the remainers the big problem is the economy just wont stick to the gloom and doom script, for the leavers it should be doing even better since the continued uncertainty is putting off investment decisions.
In Brighton and Hove, three independents intend to align formally with TIG as soon as this week. Warren Morgan, the former Labour leader of the council, is leading a plan that would see TIG hold the balance of power ahead of local elections this spring.
Labour representatives from 10 councils wrote a joint letter to The Sunday Times last night declaring they had defected.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/councillors-quit-labour-intimidation-and-prepare-to-join-tig-v6ln3xs37
House prices seem pretty static other than in the frothy London end of the market which is dominated by foreign cash. This is a good thing as affordability is increasing, hence the growth of first time buyers.
The tax returns in January showed that self employed earnings are rising more rapidly than PAYE earnings. An example I can give is that earnings at the Scottish bar (roughly 450 self employed) rose by nearly 10% last year. The anecdotal evidence of spending in York last night is another example.
Lawyers, for example, are vastly over-represented. Computer programmers vastly under-represented -- now many MPs could write even a small python program?
Luciana Berger representing Liverpool Wavertress --- you're having a larf:
"Asked by the local newspaper to answer four questions on her adopted city, Ms Berger stumbled, admitting she had never heard of the legendary Liverpool football manager Bill Shankly, nor did she know who sang "Ferry Across the Mersey" (Gerry & the Pacemakers), The actor and Liverpool celebrity Ricky Tomlinson threatened to stand against her after it emerged that during the candidate selection she had stayed at the house of the outgoing Blairite incumbent MP, Jane Kennedy." (The Independent 23 April 2010).
And we haven't even mentioned her personalised number plate yet.
Or has a couple of documentary features still to watch ?
Green Book was enjoyable, but I couldn't elevate it to "brilliant". That said, plenty of the winners tonight wouldn't rate "brilliant" in a rather drab, unremarkable year of film.
My hunch is that an inclusive approach will look attractive to voters repulsed by how the old two have been captured by narrow sects.
The fate of the breakaways will not be entirely – not even mainly – in their own hands. The traction they achieve with the voters and whether more MPs join them will depend greatly on the behaviour of the parties they have departed. Will the Tories and Labour examine what is it about them that so disgusted these MPs that they felt they had no choice but to leave? Or will the ugly sisters decide that the answer is to carry on as they are, only more so?
For the breakaways pose a challenge to those Labour and Tory MPs who remain trapped within parties that they can no longer stand and who are agonising about whether to stay or to go. They can tell themselves that splitters never prosper, but they can also feel the powerful sense of liberation radiated by those who have chosen to snap their chains and try something new.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/24/independents-offer-hope-to-those-who-despair-of-our-broken-politics
Mr B2's point about credit is germane too; there seems to be an increasing number of adverts from loan companies, and although some of the worst excess have been curbed, they still provide a very expensive way of obtaining credit.
Anecdote alert, but I was recently 'debating' on a Facebook site devoted to residents of a strong Leave area, and made some comment about prosperity. I was immediately jumped on by several posters; it was OK for middle-class people like me to talk about prosperity but they weren't seeing it.
Always dangerous to use one example from one's own experience of course!
Whilst I agree with you that @Cyclefree has overegged the rhetorical pudding a little in the lead, can you point me to this frothy London market? AFAICS it is experiencing a useful correction.
Is there another London I don't know about?
Most people I know in London are whinging their heads off about loss of perceived wealth.
I have plenty of contempt though for those like Tredinnick, who cannot be arsed to even visit his constituency.
I also note that Winston Churchill was a drop in candidate in several unrelated seats.
The Leave campaign said "Do you want to stop paying your electricity bill, but still be able to see at night?"
The people voted for free electricity, the Government are struggling to deliver it, and the people will be miffed when it doesn't happen.
The party got some stick in the local press, and I got some criticism in person.
The trust says they fed 913,138 people nationwide in the year 2013-14, more than a third of which were children.
In an interview with BBC One's Sunday Politics, Mr Duncan Smith said 1.5 million people a week used food banks in Germany.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30470120
Who knows, perhaps if we get further into the EU there will be *more* food banks?
* If that stat has been debunked, I would like to see it.