The “Labour Party” is essentially a deal between the Blairites and the hard left.
I'm pretty sick and tired of the far left's stereotyping of Labour members who aren't signed up Corbynites as "Blarites". I'm pretty sure that the current leader is too.
I’m not sure if you’re having a go at me here or not, but I’m not on the “far left” and I was making no such point, I was merely demonstrating the peculiarities of the party system under FPTP.
Fair enough, no I wasn't having a go at you as such so apologies if that came across a bit strong. Rather I'm just pointing out that your adopting the terminology of the far left is quite sensitive to me, as well as being inaccurate. As a former CLP Secretary I can assure you that I know dozens of members and former members who were in the dog days of 1997 to 2010 always pretty pissed off with the centrism of New Labour and the missed opportunity it represented, yet who are anything but Corbyn supporters. That includes me, I left the party in 2007 because I felt that the appointment of a Tory (Digby Jones) as a Labour minister was the final straw, and rejoined in 2010 in time to vote for Ed Miliband in order to try and head off a continuation.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
I believe you still think of Scots as 'they' dontcha? Always good to get the anthropological view of those who deign to live among us.
Not being Scottish, I do, yes. I think the 'they' word about millionaires, women, people who can play the piano, children etc. But I think of us all as being British - which is lovely.
What I don't do is grade people on their Scottishness, which you apparently do.
Do I think of a middle aged stripper making a buck while sad old guys stare into their pints of Special as more Scottish than Tony Blair? You bet.
Blair was never Scottish
He was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. What do you have to do to qualify as Scottish?
The SNP did promise civic nationalism - not pure enough for you?
The much more interesting question would be does Tony Blair consider himself Scottish? I doubt it but am open to persuasion.
IDS was born in Scotland so is also Scottish arguably
He's a Surrey Highlander.
Liam Fox and Michael Gove of course are Scottish born and raised too
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
I believe you still think of Scots as 'they' dontcha? Always good to get the anthropological view of those who deign to live among us.
Not being Scottish, I do, yes. I think the 'they' word about millionaires, women, people who can play the piano, children etc. But I think of us all as being British - which is lovely.
What I don't do is grade people on their Scottishness, which you apparently do.
Do I think of a middle aged stripper making a buck while sad old guys stare into their pints of Special as more Scottish than Tony Blair? You bet.
Blair was never Scottish
He was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. What do you have to do to qualify as Scottish?
The SNP did promise civic nationalism - not pure enough for you?
The much more interesting question would be does Tony Blair consider himself Scottish? I doubt it but am open to persuasion.
IDS was born in Scotland so is also Scottish arguably
Which Bundesliga team are we all adopting? I am going with FC St Pauli for their impeccable left wing and anti-fash credentials. Even though they are having a shit year.
Careful, you'll be accused of being a de facto Celtic supporter.
Means I must be a Rangers supporter
With that avatar?
Have you been south of Derby?
Lived south of Derby for good few years, Little Gaddesden Hemel Hempstead Alresford Chandlers Ford and a Year in the Winchester Royal Hotel spent lot of time in London but only in hotels, never lived there.
The Lib Dems need to make a deal with Keir Starmer, in return for the implementation of STV. Simple as that.
Maybe after the election and with a referendum. Labour can't do pre-election deals because it brings the unanswerable question of "would you do a deal with the SNP?"
Can’t avoid it forever. A deal with the SNP is pretty much a necessity in order for Labour to form a Government under FPTP.
If that's Labour thinking then you might as well wave goodbye to majority government forever. People just won't vote for a party that aims to be in minority government, not in enough numbers to depose us. Your aim has got to be more than just "deny the Tories as majority" we'll keep winning if we're the only party that can offer majority government.
Blair delivered a majority by appealing to our voters, I don't know where Starmer stands but on recent history Labour seems more interested in lecturing and hectoring our voters for having the temerity to vote Tory, that was true under Ed as well.
Yes. All this FPTP is not fair is ridiculous. If enough voters in, say, Arundel and South Down and any other Cons constituency vote Labour there will be a Labour majority government.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
I believe you still think of Scots as 'they' dontcha? Always good to get the anthropological view of those who deign to live among us.
Not being Scottish, I do, yes. I think the 'they' word about millionaires, women, people who can play the piano, children etc. But I think of us all as being British - which is lovely.
What I don't do is grade people on their Scottishness, which you apparently do.
Do I think of a middle aged stripper making a buck while sad old guys stare into their pints of Special as more Scottish than Tony Blair? You bet.
Blair was never Scottish
He was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. What do you have to do to qualify as Scottish?
The SNP did promise civic nationalism - not pure enough for you?
The much more interesting question would be does Tony Blair consider himself Scottish? I doubt it but am open to persuasion.
My guess is that he would think of himself as British more than anything else, but Scottish enough to get a Scottish passport after independence.
He'd probably check the extradition treaties first mind.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
Ironically a drought could be good for Boris if he takes the opportunity to build new reservoirs and pipelines, creating jobs and helping to get the economy moving again.
Where?
The NIMBYs are not going to be in favour
Reservoirs are basically big lakes that encourage wildfowl and wildflowers so I'd not expect much objection, unless Boris opts for big, ugly, concrete swimming pools instead, but given he nearly gave us the garden bridge, we may be all right there.
My Aunt used to live in a house near Kirk Ireton that is now underneath Carsington Water. I can't say that she was that happy about it.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
HMG needs to put together a team of very capable people to review all the “care-home” models around the world and prepare a report on much needed reform to the whole sector. HMG needs to then actually implement it. It should have been done yesterday.
Though my Mother in Law is very well looked after in a care home setting. She does crafts most afternoons. She is not distressed by her dementia, more amiably muddled.
There is so much that is right in this article that it's a pity the underlying premise renders it null and void.
Johnson won the Tories their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher. She was given free rein in three General Elections (1979, 1983, 1987) and no one would touch her.
We tend to filter what we think we know through the prism of recent experience and I'm afraid David you have fallen foul of this. You're thinking Boris is Cameron. He isn't. Cameron did win but only just and his coalition victory followed by 12-seat majority gave the plotters the oxygen they needed.
Boris has one single undeniable firewall. He won handsomely. The party won't touch him.
There is one huge difference. No-one could touch Thatcher for so long because she was ideologically in tune with the membership. They still worship her.
There is no guarantee the membership are going to be too enamoured with Boris's leadership once they have experienced it for a while. He took a calculated risk that being "Mr Brexit" would win him the leadership and the GE. That strategy paid off brilliantly. However who really knows what else his government is going to do?
My guess is that BigG is correct and he will be a "one nation" Tory. I think it will be a big state, high spending government and I think that that was the case even before Covid19. Whether it can also remain a low-tax government remains to be seen. I don't see how it can.
He may remain popular in the country but I don't think it will be long before there are rumblings of discontent in the party and the membership. If he is serious about prioritising the voters in the new Tory seats in the north and midlands i order to retain those seats I don't think the wealthier southern membership base is going to be too thrilled about what that means in practice.
It will be a low tax, big spend, big borrowing, populist Berlusconi, George W Bush style government
Berlusconi, definitely. Berlusconi screwed the Italians figuratively and literally, just as Johnson is doing to the British. If you want a vision of the UK in a few years time, assuming it's still intact, look at Italy now.
We're tracking Italy again?
Oh no.
Looks like it. By the way, excellent analysis of just how effective the "Get Brexit Done" message turned out. Problem, it's not just effective as a message. It's highly disingenuous. Brexit has big and generally bad consequences for the UK. These can't be tied back to Brexit and accepted as part of the package, because Brexit was "done". It's storing up a lot of problems.
The Lib Dems need to make a deal with Keir Starmer, in return for the implementation of STV. Simple as that.
Maybe after the election and with a referendum. Labour can't do pre-election deals because it brings the unanswerable question of "would you do a deal with the SNP?"
Can’t avoid it forever. A deal with the SNP is pretty much a necessity in order for Labour to form a Government under FPTP.
If that's Labour thinking then you might as well wave goodbye to majority government forever. People just won't vote for a party that aims to be in minority government, not in enough numbers to depose us. Your aim has got to be more than just "deny the Tories as majority" we'll keep winning if we're the only party that can offer majority government.
Blair delivered a majority by appealing to our voters, I don't know where Starmer stands but on recent history Labour seems more interested in lecturing and hectoring our voters for having the temerity to vote Tory, that was true under Ed as well.
Yes. All this FPTP is not fair is ridiculous. If enough voters in, say, Arundel and South Down and any other Cons constituency vote Labour there will be a Labour majority government.
It's all about the policies.
Yes, if Labour can convince 3m Tory voters to switch to them they will win a majority. The trouble is that the only way to do it is to run into the centre, I don't know what Starmer stands for other than being a lawyer who loves to do detail but seems ignorant of the bigger picture.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
I believe you still think of Scots as 'they' dontcha? Always good to get the anthropological view of those who deign to live among us.
Not being Scottish, I do, yes. I think the 'they' word about millionaires, women, people who can play the piano, children etc. But I think of us all as being British - which is lovely.
What I don't do is grade people on their Scottishness, which you apparently do.
Do I think of a middle aged stripper making a buck while sad old guys stare into their pints of Special as more Scottish than Tony Blair? You bet.
Blair was never Scottish
Blair was born in Edinburgh and went to School in Scotland, he was Scottish
He went to Fettes under duress when he was thirteen and hated it, he could not get out of Scotland quick enough, apart from that he spent his life in Australia or England and never returned to Scotland.
Ironically a drought could be good for Boris if he takes the opportunity to build new reservoirs and pipelines, creating jobs and helping to get the economy moving again.
Where?
The NIMBYs are not going to be in favour
Reservoirs are basically big lakes that encourage wildfowl and wildflowers so I'd not expect much objection, unless Boris opts for big, ugly, concrete swimming pools instead, but given he nearly gave us the garden bridge, we may be all right there.
Cofiwch Dryweryn. (Remember Tryweryn. - which was a village flooded to build a reservoir for I think Liverpool back in the 50’s/60’s). Not only is it a famous graffito in its original location up in north Wales, I was amazed to see a house this very week in a very leafy part of Cardiff with that displayed that on the front.
Total political dynamite in parts of Wales if you start building reservoirs willy nilly.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
The Lib Dems need to make a deal with Keir Starmer, in return for the implementation of STV. Simple as that.
Maybe after the election and with a referendum. Labour can't do pre-election deals because it brings the unanswerable question of "would you do a deal with the SNP?"
Can’t avoid it forever. A deal with the SNP is pretty much a necessity in order for Labour to form a Government under FPTP.
If that's Labour thinking then you might as well wave goodbye to majority government forever. People just won't vote for a party that aims to be in minority government, not in enough numbers to depose us. Your aim has got to be more than just "deny the Tories as majority" we'll keep winning if we're the only party that can offer majority government.
Blair delivered a majority by appealing to our voters, I don't know where Starmer stands but on recent history Labour seems more interested in lecturing and hectoring our voters for having the temerity to vote Tory, that was true under Ed as well.
Yes. All this FPTP is not fair is ridiculous. If enough voters in, say, Arundel and South Down and any other Cons constituency vote Labour there will be a Labour majority government.
It's all about the policies.
Yes, if Labour can convince 3m Tory voters to switch to them they will win a majority. The trouble is that the only way to do it is to run into the centre, I don't know what Starmer stands for other than being a lawyer who loves to do detail but seems ignorant of the bigger picture.
Cameron did not win a majority in 2010 but got in with the LDs, if enough Tory Remain voters vote LD next time Starmer could do the same
Ironically a drought could be good for Boris if he takes the opportunity to build new reservoirs and pipelines, creating jobs and helping to get the economy moving again.
Where?
The NIMBYs are not going to be in favour
Reservoirs are basically big lakes that encourage wildfowl and wildflowers so I'd not expect much objection, unless Boris opts for big, ugly, concrete swimming pools instead, but given he nearly gave us the garden bridge, we may be all right there.
My Aunt used to live in a house near Kirk Ireton that is now underneath Carsington Water. I can't say that she was that happy about it.
I found out some interesting things recently. A friend of a friend of my wife was trying to raise a campaign to fight a reservoir.
I found out the following -
- Resevoir in question was to re-work uninhabited land, including an old, closed gravel pit. - Plan was basically, to build a lake. No visible installations. - When I asked why oppose, was told it Is Bad For The Environment. - Asked bad how. - After some to and fro. Apparently All The Works Of Man Are Evil. - Pointing out that the population is increasing is racist. apparently. - It is Middle Class thinking to think that more water for more people is the way to go.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
It's a good point. My experience of posh Scots makes Scotland look like a feudal bastion in comparison with down-to-earth, egalitarian England.
Quite. At my first employer in Scotland the office staff spoke quite unironically about 'undesirables' in their local area. I know several lovely Scots obsessed with name-dropping when they might have run into an Earl at some committee or event (at least one of whom is a vocal SNP supporter - which doesn't stop him going weak at the knees at a sniff of the tweedy upper crust). I can't see a shred of evidence that Scots are any less aware of or interested in social class, though perhaps it is more so on the West Coast where I've spent less time.
There was none of this shit in Fife.
I guess St Andrews should be considered an enclave, a wee breath of the home counties. Difficult to believe it and Kelty exist in the same county.
Ha ha, I grew up in St Andrews. It is certainly quite different from some other parts of Fife, but it has more in common with Oxford or Cambridge than the home counties, and there are also some pretty tough places in the surrounding area. You didn't mess with the kids from Tayport.
Fair enough, I yield to on the ground experience! I had cousins who had a farm outside St Andrews with whom I stayed a few time as a boy; we certainly didn't see much of the kids from Tayport but plenty of bracing walks on the seafront & cathedral, much to my disgust.
Had a weekend break there last year, and we ended up in a local howff that had chairs outside so I could have a smoke, tbf not home counties at all.
I couldn't wait to leave as a kid but now when I go home to see my folks I realise it is a magical place. I have got too soft for the Scottish climate though.
I have lived a good few places , some with great climates like California but for sure I am back home and can suffer the weather no problem, when it is nice here it really is magical. Also it is much milder nowadays than when I was a boy.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate; they always could.
You couldn't have picnics or sunbathe with others outside your household or travel large distances to exercise before this weekend, you now can
A quick question - In the 2024 General Election Boris and the Tories will be defending an 80 seat majority and Labour would need to win 124 seats to have a majority of 1. This surely would require a bigger swing than Tony Blair managed in 1997? Is Sir Keir Starmer capable of a Blair like sweep across the country? With the Tories likely to push through boundary reforms without much of a challenge using their big majority to push them through, Scotland still remaining a problem for the Labour Party and Labour likely under Starmers leadership to campaign on more of a remain manifesto further alienating Labours old red wall further are we not being premature writing off Boris or the Tories? Surely the mountain is too big for the Labour party to climb in one election and we are probably looking at a 1992 John Major type of win for the Tories? Or Labour most seats and most votes but nowhere near enough to form a functioning government?
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
I believe you still think of Scots as 'they' dontcha? Always good to get the anthropological view of those who deign to live among us.
Not being Scottish, I do, yes. I think the 'they' word about millionaires, women, people who can play the piano, children etc. But I think of us all as being British - which is lovely.
What I don't do is grade people on their Scottishness, which you apparently do.
Do I think of a middle aged stripper making a buck while sad old guys stare into their pints of Special as more Scottish than Tony Blair? You bet.
Blair was never Scottish
He was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. What do you have to do to qualify as Scottish?
The SNP did promise civic nationalism - not pure enough for you?
The much more interesting question would be does Tony Blair consider himself Scottish? I doubt it but am open to persuasion.
IDS was born in Scotland so is also Scottish arguably
Oh dear now you are really scraping the barrel. What next Hague or Jacob Rees Mogg.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
I know you have a bitter take on Boris but you may find that the public enquiries have a lot more to say about the public health bodies and the scientific advisors
Unfortunately my Mother in Laws excellent care home in the Isle of Wight now has several cases. Worrying, and a desperately sad situation.
One of the many awful things about Covid-19 is how people die without family around them. Even our hardy ICU consultants, who have made decisions to end intervention on a weekly basis for years find this distressing.
And, dare one venture to say it, the Covid crisis in care homes doesn't end with the disease. A high proportion of care home residents are demented, and are presently being warehoused in solitary confinement basically with no human contact apart from help with feeding and essential personal care, gradually wasting away despite the best efforts of the staff.
At the end of all of this there are going to be many relatives who, having left their loved ones in a state of mild cognitive impairment, go back again to discover that they are either completely uncommunicative or have no idea who this stranger who's just come to see them actually is.
There's arguably an issue here of the prioritisation of quantity of life over quality of life, but in your line of work I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that society often isn't very comfortable about having conversations on that subject.
I do wonder if, in at least the milder cases, there is now an obvious technological answer to the problem of social isolation in care homes. Zoom is not just for passing Cabinet secrets to China.
From what coverage I've seen some of the care homes at least have been making much use of modern communications technology, but it's still no substitute for real human contact and is also difficult for more impaired residents to get to grips with.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
I believe you still think of Scots as 'they' dontcha? Always good to get the anthropological view of those who deign to live among us.
Not being Scottish, I do, yes. I think the 'they' word about millionaires, women, people who can play the piano, children etc. But I think of us all as being British - which is lovely.
What I don't do is grade people on their Scottishness, which you apparently do.
Do I think of a middle aged stripper making a buck while sad old guys stare into their pints of Special as more Scottish than Tony Blair? You bet.
Blair was never Scottish
He was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. What do you have to do to qualify as Scottish?
The SNP did promise civic nationalism - not pure enough for you?
The much more interesting question would be does Tony Blair consider himself Scottish? I doubt it but am open to persuasion.
IDS was born in Scotland so is also Scottish arguably
He's a Surrey Highlander.
Liam Fox and Michael Gove of course are Scottish born and raised too
You are through the barrel now , I understand your posts on Scotland now and why they are so absolutely bonkers.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate; they always could.
You couldn't have picnics or sunbathe with others outside your household or travel large distances to exercise before this weekend, you now can
There is so much that is right in this article that it's a pity the underlying premise renders it null and void.
Johnson won the Tories their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher. She was given free rein in three General Elections (1979, 1983, 1987) and no one would touch her.
We tend to filter what we think we know through the prism of recent experience and I'm afraid David you have fallen foul of this. You're thinking Boris is Cameron. He isn't. Cameron did win but only just and his coalition victory followed by 12-seat majority gave the plotters the oxygen they needed.
Boris has one single undeniable firewall. He won handsomely. The party won't touch him.
The Tories won the 1983 and 1987 elections by significantly bigger majorities than Johnson managed in 2019 against Corbyn. That did not stop the Tories ditching her in 1990 when she became an electoral liability.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
No you couldn't always within the guidance rules. The new guidance should be put into context by being compared with the old guidance. That is like for like context.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
No you couldn't always within the guidance rules.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
The article says "you can now do this". It elides the difference between the law and the guidance. Which I would expect the government to do but not the BBC.
It is an article on the BBC mobile app under "here's some advice on the rules on exercising".
There is so much that is right in this article that it's a pity the underlying premise renders it null and void.
Johnson won the Tories their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher. She was given free rein in three General Elections (1979, 1983, 1987) and no one would touch her.
We tend to filter what we think we know through the prism of recent experience and I'm afraid David you have fallen foul of this. You're thinking Boris is Cameron. He isn't. Cameron did win but only just and his coalition victory followed by 12-seat majority gave the plotters the oxygen they needed.
Boris has one single undeniable firewall. He won handsomely. The party won't touch him.
There is one huge difference. No-one could touch Thatcher for so long because she was ideologically in tune with the membership. They still worship her.
There is no guarantee the membership are going to be too enamoured with Boris's leadership once they have experienced it for a while. He took a calculated risk that being "Mr Brexit" would win him the leadership and the GE. That strategy paid off brilliantly. However who really knows what else his government is going to do?
My guess is that BigG is correct and he will be a "one nation" Tory. I think it will be a big state, high spending government and I think that that was the case even before Covid19. Whether it can also remain a low-tax government remains to be seen. I don't see how it can.
He may remain popular in the country but I don't think it will be long before there are rumblings of discontent in the party and the membership. If he is serious about prioritising the voters in the new Tory seats in the north and midlands i order to retain those seats I don't think the wealthier southern membership base is going to be too thrilled about what that means in practice.
It will be a low tax, big spend, big borrowing, populist Berlusconi, George W Bush style government
Berlusconi, definitely. Berlusconi screwed the Italians figuratively and literally, just as Johnson is doing to the British. If you want a vision of the UK in a few years time, assuming it's still intact, look at Italy now.
We're tracking Italy again?
Oh no.
Looks like it. By the way, excellent analysis of just how effective the "Get Brexit Done" message turned out. Problem, it's not just effective as a message. It's highly disingenuous. Brexit has big and generally bad consequences for the UK. These can't be tied back to Brexit and accepted as part of the package, because Brexit was "done". It's storing up a lot of problems.
Thanks. I do think it was an election that Johnson won more than one that Corbyn lost. Although there is some of both obviously.
And I agree about the mendacity of the message. Done? If only.
As for tracking Italy, that is definitely not the way to go - but at least we'll win the World Cup at some point.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
No you couldn't always within the guidance rules.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
The article says "you can now do this". It elides the difference between the law and the guidance. Which I would expect the government to do but not the BBC.
It is an article on the BBC mobile app under "here's some advice on the rules on exercising".
There we go you've just shown I'm right.
The law is the law. The rules are guidance. If the article said "here's some advice on the laws on exercising" you'd be right. It doesn't.
The Lib Dems need to make a deal with Keir Starmer, in return for the implementation of STV. Simple as that.
And the SNP need to make a deal with Keir Starmer on a referendum on independence.
The two demands go together.
If the Scots get independence then the Labour needs STV to avoid permanent Tory hegemony in England and Wales.
STV prevents the SNP from winning disproportionate numbers of MPs. I don't know how Labour have done with STV in Scottish local elections, but I'd have thought it's one of their best chances of a recovery in Westminster elections in Scotland.
STV in England and Wales would be implemented after the Scots get independence. It would be up to the Scots what system they adopt subsequently.
Electoral reform will only come if and when Labour is absolutely convinced that it can never, ever win a majority under FPTP again - yet can scrape together a coalition to remove the Tories for long enough to make it happen. Thus, if Scotland goes, the likelihood of reform down South becomes more, not less, remote.
In what's essentially a straight two-party fight, you have to believe that the Opposition is going to get Buggins' turn sooner or later. If it does then the incentive for reform necessarily evaporates. If it doesn't, and we end up with a Japanese-style one-and-a-half party system in England, then Labour may never get the chance to make the change.
There is so much that is right in this article that it's a pity the underlying premise renders it null and void.
Johnson won the Tories their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher. She was given free rein in three General Elections (1979, 1983, 1987) and no one would touch her.
We tend to filter what we think we know through the prism of recent experience and I'm afraid David you have fallen foul of this. You're thinking Boris is Cameron. He isn't. Cameron did win but only just and his coalition victory followed by 12-seat majority gave the plotters the oxygen they needed.
Boris has one single undeniable firewall. He won handsomely. The party won't touch him.
The Tories won the 1983 and 1987 elections by significantly bigger majorities than Johnson managed in 2019 against Corbyn. That did not stop the Tories ditching her in 1990 when she became an electoral liability.
And as a result the Tories only won one majority for the next 25 years and the poll tax was far more unpopular with Tory voters than WTO terms with Boris will be with them
A quick question - In the 2024 General Election Boris and the Tories will be defending an 80 seat majority and Labour would need to win 124 seats to have a majority of 1. This surely would require a bigger swing than Tony Blair managed in 1997? Is Sir Keir Starmer capable of a Blair like sweep across the country? With the Tories likely to push through boundary reforms without much of a challenge using their big majority to push them through, Scotland still remaining a problem for the Labour Party and Labour likely under Starmers leadership to campaign on more of a remain manifesto further alienating Labours old red wall further are we not being premature writing off Boris or the Tories? Surely the mountain is too big for the Labour party to climb in one election and we are probably looking at a 1992 John Major type of win for the Tories? Or Labour most seats and most votes but nowhere near enough to form a functioning government?
Boundary reforms in themselves do not particularly benefit one party over another; it was the package under Cameron/Osborne that made them tantamount to gerrymandering.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
I wonder how much clout Starmer would have had with his parents at age 14 if he had wanted to move schools anyway. I remember my own school changing from Grammar School to comprehensive when I was in yr 10. Children had no input into school decisions back in the day ( well, I didn't anyway)
One of the government’s criticisms is the lack of official campaigns in EU member states to raise awareness about new requirements for UK nationals – a stipulation under the treaty.
France and Spain, home to large numbers of UK migrant workers and retired people, are deemed not to have done anything proactive to raise awareness among British residents. The Czech Republic and Hungary have published information that is thought to be confusing or out-of-date, without translation into English. In contrast – the government says – information on the settlement scheme for EU nationals in the UK is available in other EU languages. In Austria and Slovenia the government is concerned British nationals have only six or seven months to secure their rights, whereas EU nationals in the UK have 27 months.
Other EU member states, such as Malta, Cyprus and Slovakia, are faulted for relying on face-to-face meetings with local officials, rather than offering people the option to secure their status online.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
No you couldn't always within the guidance rules.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
The article says "you can now do this". It elides the difference between the law and the guidance. Which I would expect the government to do but not the BBC.
It is an article on the BBC mobile app under "here's some advice on the rules on exercising".
There we go you've just shown I'm right.
The law is the law. The rules are guidance. If the article said "here's some advice on the laws on exercising" you'd be right. It doesn't.
You can break the rules without breaking the law.
And the BBC, being a supposedly critical news organisation, should imo make exactly that distinction.
There is so much that is right in this article that it's a pity the underlying premise renders it null and void.
Johnson won the Tories their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher. She was given free rein in three General Elections (1979, 1983, 1987) and no one would touch her.
We tend to filter what we think we know through the prism of recent experience and I'm afraid David you have fallen foul of this. You're thinking Boris is Cameron. He isn't. Cameron did win but only just and his coalition victory followed by 12-seat majority gave the plotters the oxygen they needed.
Boris has one single undeniable firewall. He won handsomely. The party won't touch him.
The Tories won the 1983 and 1987 elections by significantly bigger majorities than Johnson managed in 2019 against Corbyn. That did not stop the Tories ditching her in 1990 when she became an electoral liability.
And as a result the Tories only won one majority for the next 25 years and the poll tax was far more unpopular with Tory voters than WTO terms with Boris will be with them
What part of “people don’t understand what WTO terms actually means” do you not understand?
Support of it is irrelevant when nobody, me and you included, really understands what effect it will have in both the short and long term on every day life.
A quick question - In the 2024 General Election Boris and the Tories will be defending an 80 seat majority and Labour would need to win 124 seats to have a majority of 1. This surely would require a bigger swing than Tony Blair managed in 1997? Is Sir Keir Starmer capable of a Blair like sweep across the country? With the Tories likely to push through boundary reforms without much of a challenge using their big majority to push them through, Scotland still remaining a problem for the Labour Party and Labour likely under Starmers leadership to campaign on more of a remain manifesto further alienating Labours old red wall further are we not being premature writing off Boris or the Tories? Surely the mountain is too big for the Labour party to climb in one election and we are probably looking at a 1992 John Major type of win for the Tories? Or Labour most seats and most votes but nowhere near enough to form a functioning government?
Good morning, welcome, and it appears that in % terms Labour need the same swing as 1997 - 10.2% - for a majority of one. I think it well within the capabilities of this government to get itself as loathed by 2024 as Major was by 1997. But predictions are hard to make, especially about the future, even more than usual.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
No you couldn't always within the guidance rules. The new guidance should be put into context by being compared with the old guidance. That is like for like context.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
Not to interfere in this exchange but from PT on the subject of whether "Boris" really was 17.5 stone before he got the virus -
You say you can well believe it because he is "athletic" and "all muscle".
I would like you to reflect on that comment. I know it was late, but still.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
No you couldn't always within the guidance rules.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
The article says "you can now do this". It elides the difference between the law and the guidance. Which I would expect the government to do but not the BBC.
It is an article on the BBC mobile app under "here's some advice on the rules on exercising".
There we go you've just shown I'm right.
The law is the law. The rules are guidance. If the article said "here's some advice on the laws on exercising" you'd be right. It doesn't.
You can break the rules without breaking the law.
And the BBC, being a supposedly critical news organisation, should imo make exactly that distinction.
It did if it referenced "guidelines" in the article like the link I gave. You haven't given one so I can only guess that's the same one.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Hah. I am from Solihull. IDS’s school was right next to my one (in fact there are three secondary schools on the same road). Solihull is pretty damn posh, especially so in IDS’s day.
I've never been more aware of the BBC as a State Broadcaster than now. It's mobile front page is essentially a cut and paste from the Ministry of Information.
Even to the point of getting it presumably intentionally wrong over the new exercise rules. It says you can now exercise outside with someone from outside your household for the first time. Which is wrong. You always could.
No you couldn't unless you reckon you can freely stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers and that there's no such thing as a 2 metre rule.
"Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a)where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household, (b)where the gathering is essential for work purposes, (c)to attend a funeral, etc..."
And the two metre rule is advice not the law.
Not all rules are laws.
The two metre rule is a rule. The only exercising once per day was a rule.
That was my point. You could always under the law go outside with two people. The BBC is making out that it is a recent thing.
It is if you are following the rules and not just the law.
If the government announced they were lifting the two metre rule and the BBC reported that would you say "why are they reporting that it was never the law?"
You are becoming a bit HYUFD-like.
You could always exercise outdoors with someone not in your household. As per the law.
Nothing has changed in this respect yet the BBC is reporting as though it is a new development.
So what?
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
The BBC says this today:
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate.
It's entirely accurate. That's what is allowed within the guidance now.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
It is inaccurate because you could always do that.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
No you couldn't always within the guidance rules.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
The article says "you can now do this". It elides the difference between the law and the guidance. Which I would expect the government to do but not the BBC.
It is an article on the BBC mobile app under "here's some advice on the rules on exercising".
There we go you've just shown I'm right.
The law is the law. The rules are guidance. If the article said "here's some advice on the laws on exercising" you'd be right. It doesn't.
You can break the rules without breaking the law.
And the BBC, being a supposedly critical news organisation, should imo make exactly that distinction.
It did if it referenced "guidelines" in the article like the link I gave. You haven't given one so I can only guess that's the same one.
Yes. It explicitly contrasts "rules" with "guidelines" as though they are different. They are not. They are the same thing. Which the BBC should have explained.
People expecting (hoping) Boris steps down are underestimating the ego of politicians especially at the highest level. Has it ever happened before?
OK they stand down rsather than be sacked or sometimes over a point of principle but boredom? No chance
Keep an eye on Boris's pulse, or rather his breathing. Several Prime Ministers retired on health grounds, including Eden, Macmillan and Wilson.
I don't think Wilson did so - despite repeated suggestions. When he returned as PM in March 1974 , he made it clear to those close to him that he would not be serving a full term - also indicated by failure to return to No.10. Suggestions of mental decline are contradicted by the work he undertook after leaving office - a further set of memoirs plus other books , chairing a Commission into the City , broadcasting and worldwide lectures. In so far as he was no longer as sharp as he had been, it was likely to have been the natural ageing process - ie being 60plus rather than 50. Early signs of dementia did not appear until the mid-1980s.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demonstrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them.
The "Tories" are simply highlighting Starmer's hypocritical prolier than thou fibs: pretending to be working class when he is no such thing.
The wider point is that the SNP line that England is full of posho snobs is simply not true. In fact having an upper class background is a severe disadvantage, particularly in politics.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Hah. I am from Solihull. IDS’s school was right next to my one (in fact there are three secondary schools on the same road). Solihull is pretty damn posh, especially so in IDS’s day.
Reigate is also pretty posh and Reigate grammar school is certainly poster than Bishop Glancey secondary modern
There is so much that is right in this article that it's a pity the underlying premise renders it null and void.
Johnson won the Tories their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher. She was given free rein in three General Elections (1979, 1983, 1987) and no one would touch her.
We tend to filter what we think we know through the prism of recent experience and I'm afraid David you have fallen foul of this. You're thinking Boris is Cameron. He isn't. Cameron did win but only just and his coalition victory followed by 12-seat majority gave the plotters the oxygen they needed.
Boris has one single undeniable firewall. He won handsomely. The party won't touch him.
The Tories won the 1983 and 1987 elections by significantly bigger majorities than Johnson managed in 2019 against Corbyn. That did not stop the Tories ditching her in 1990 when she became an electoral liability.
And as a result the Tories only won one majority for the next 25 years and the poll tax was far more unpopular with Tory voters than WTO terms with Boris will be with them
But how big would Johnson's majority been in 2019 had he faced Starmer? 2015 probably provides a better clue.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Hah. I am from Solihull. IDS’s school was right next to my one (in fact there are three secondary schools on the same road). Solihull is pretty damn posh, especially so in IDS’s day.
Reigate is also pretty posh and Reigate grammar school is certainly poster thsn Bishop Glancey secondary modern
How do you know? Have you been to Bishop Glancey secondary modern? The school is actually now a catholic school, I used to fancy quite a few girls who went there.
Your obsession with Keir’s “poshness” is very weird though, I feel it’s something you should get over.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demonstrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them.
The "Tories" are simply highlighting Starmer's hypocritical prolier than thou fibs: pretending to be working class when he is no such thing.
The wider point is that the SNP line that England is full of posho snobs is simply not true. In fact having an upper class background is a severe disadvantage, particularly in politics.
A surprising number of people have not noticed that we have a new Upper 10,000 - and they are not much of an improvement on the old.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Hah. I am from Solihull. IDS’s school was right next to my one (in fact there are three secondary schools on the same road). Solihull is pretty damn posh, especially so in IDS’s day.
Let’s face it, Solihull is a part of Birmingham and Birmingham has no posh parts.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Hah. I am from Solihull. IDS’s school was right next to my one (in fact there are three secondary schools on the same road). Solihull is pretty damn posh, especially so in IDS’s day.
Let’s face it, Solihull is a part of Birmingham and Birmingham has no posh parts.
*Lights blue touch paper and retires*
Technically Solihull is not part of the City of Birmingham, so...
One of the government’s criticisms is the lack of official campaigns in EU member states to raise awareness about new requirements for UK nationals – a stipulation under the treaty.
France and Spain, home to large numbers of UK migrant workers and retired people, are deemed not to have done anything proactive to raise awareness among British residents. The Czech Republic and Hungary have published information that is thought to be confusing or out-of-date, without translation into English. In contrast – the government says – information on the settlement scheme for EU nationals in the UK is available in other EU languages. In Austria and Slovenia the government is concerned British nationals have only six or seven months to secure their rights, whereas EU nationals in the UK have 27 months.
Other EU member states, such as Malta, Cyprus and Slovakia, are faulted for relying on face-to-face meetings with local officials, rather than offering people the option to secure their status online.
People expecting (hoping) Boris steps down are underestimating the ego of politicians especially at the highest level. Has it ever happened before?
OK they stand down rsather than be sacked or sometimes over a point of principle but boredom? No chance
Keep an eye on Boris's pulse, or rather his breathing. Several Prime Ministers retired on health grounds, including Eden, Macmillan and Wilson.
I don't think Wilson did so - despite repeated suggestions. When he returned as PM in March 1974 , he made it clear to those close to him that he would not be serving a full term - also indicated by failure to return to No.10. Suggestions of mental decline are contradicted by the work he undertook after leaving office - a further set of memoirs plus other books , chairing a Commission into the City , broadcasting and worldwide lectures. In so far as he was no longer as sharp as he had been, it was likely to have been the natural ageing process - ie being 60plus rather than 50. Early signs of dementia did not appear until the mid-1980s.
Early signs of dementia don't necessarily appear to others, but they do to oneself and to those closest. Just going through that with a relative.
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
The BBC should be making the distinction.
It should be explaining and examining the government's actions in the round, not acting as a government spokesman.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Hah. I am from Solihull. IDS’s school was right next to my one (in fact there are three secondary schools on the same road). Solihull is pretty damn posh, especially so in IDS’s day.
Reigate is also pretty posh and Reigate grammar school is certainly poster thsn Bishop Glancey secondary modern
How do you know? Have you been to Bishop Glancey secondary modern? The school is actually now a catholic school, I used to fancy quite a few girls who went there.
Your obsession with Keir’s “poshness” is very weird though, I feel it’s something you should get over.
A secondary modern school can never be posh by definition, a grammar school will always be posher and a grammar school that became an independent school posher still.
I have no problem with Sir Keir being posh but it does mean the class warriors within Labour cannot play that card anymore
Reasons leaders have departed early before facing an election....
1) Total political failure (Eden, Cameron) 2) An obvious electoral liability (May, IDS) 3) Outstayed their welcome after a long stint (Thatcher, Blair) 4) Health (Macmillan, Wilson, Churchill, Gaitskill, Smith)
The others leaders left after defeat (some after hanging on too long). So where does that leave Boris going before 2024? Most like 4, then 2, then 1. I suspect if defeat become likely he will not hang around to take the humiliation.
Reasons leaders have departed early before facing an election....
1) Total political failure (Eden, Cameron) 2) An obvious electoral liability (May, IDS) 3) Outstayed their welcome after a long stint (Thatcher, Blair) 4) Health (Macmillan, Wilson, Churchill, Gaitskill, Smith)
The others leaders left after defeat (some after hanging on too long). So where does that leave Boris going before 2024? Most like 4, then 2, then 1. I suspect if defeat become likely he will not hang around to take the humiliation.
Eden was also unwell - though I do not believe Wilson resigned due to health concerns.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Hah. I am from Solihull. IDS’s school was right next to my one (in fact there are three secondary schools on the same road). Solihull is pretty damn posh, especially so in IDS’s day.
Reigate is also pretty posh and Reigate grammar school is certainly poster thsn Bishop Glancey secondary modern
How do you know? Have you been to Bishop Glancey secondary modern? The school is actually now a catholic school, I used to fancy quite a few girls who went there.
Your obsession with Keir’s “poshness” is very weird though, I feel it’s something you should get over.
A secondary modern school can never be posh by definition, a grammar school will always be poacher and a grammar school that became an independent school posted still.
I have no problem with Sir Keir being posh but it does mean the class warriors within Labour cannot play that card anymore
The only person talking about Sir Keir’s social class is you.
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
It is abundantly clear what is going on, which is that the govt is deliberately confusing the issue. It wants the rules to look like laws so that people will observe them on pain of punishment, but like voluntary guidelines to the extent that people will observe them out of their own inherent virtue, and get a nice warm and pro-governmental feeling out of it.
In what's essentially a straight two-party fight, you have to believe that the Opposition is going to get Buggins' turn sooner or later. If it does then the incentive for reform necessarily evaporates.
Looking at the USA I wonder if there is a natural inclination to drift to two balanced parties each with approximately 50% support? i.e. the party with <50% naturally tacks towards the centre.
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
It is abundantly clear what is going on, which is that the govt is deliberately confusing the issue. It wants the rules to look like laws so that people will observe them on pain of punishment, but like voluntary guidelines to the extent that people will observe them out of their own inherent virtue, and get a nice warm and pro-governmental feeling out of it.
Yep. I think it is sad that the BBC in this instance is not a voice of clarity.
People expecting (hoping) Boris steps down are underestimating the ego of politicians especially at the highest level. Has it ever happened before?
OK they stand down rsather than be sacked or sometimes over a point of principle but boredom? No chance
Keep an eye on Boris's pulse, or rather his breathing. Several Prime Ministers retired on health grounds, including Eden, Macmillan and Wilson.
I don't think Wilson did so - despite repeated suggestions. When he returned as PM in March 1974 , he made it clear to those close to him that he would not be serving a full term - also indicated by failure to return to No.10. Suggestions of mental decline are contradicted by the work he undertook after leaving office - a further set of memoirs plus other books , chairing a Commission into the City , broadcasting and worldwide lectures. In so far as he was no longer as sharp as he had been, it was likely to have been the natural ageing process - ie being 60plus rather than 50. Early signs of dementia did not appear until the mid-1980s.
Corrects one of my misapprehensions then. I thought he'd resigned due to feeling the very early symptoms of 'losing it'. When I ask myself why I think this, the answer is "well I just thought he did". I wonder how many other misapprehensions of this nature I labour under?
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
The BBC should be making the distinction.
It should be explaining and examining the government's actions in the round, not acting as a government spokesman.
Why? Why should it?
This is an article about guidelines. Why should it need to explain the difference between guidelines and law? The words mean different things and they used the right words.
You made a mistake and misread the article. Stop digging a hole.
People expecting (hoping) Boris steps down are underestimating the ego of politicians especially at the highest level. Has it ever happened before?
OK they stand down rsather than be sacked or sometimes over a point of principle but boredom? No chance
Keep an eye on Boris's pulse, or rather his breathing. Several Prime Ministers retired on health grounds, including Eden, Macmillan and Wilson.
I don't think Wilson did so - despite repeated suggestions. When he returned as PM in March 1974 , he made it clear to those close to him that he would not be serving a full term - also indicated by failure to return to No.10. Suggestions of mental decline are contradicted by the work he undertook after leaving office - a further set of memoirs plus other books , chairing a Commission into the City , broadcasting and worldwide lectures. In so far as he was no longer as sharp as he had been, it was likely to have been the natural ageing process - ie being 60plus rather than 50. Early signs of dementia did not appear until the mid-1980s.
Early signs of dementia don't necessarily appear to others, but they do to oneself and to those closest. Just going through that with a relative.
Sorry to hear that. I understand that Wilson was ill for ten years prior to his death in May 1995. There are also indications that he was also seriously affected by anesthetic associated with his bowel cancer operation in 1980.
People expecting (hoping) Boris steps down are underestimating the ego of politicians especially at the highest level. Has it ever happened before?
OK they stand down rsather than be sacked or sometimes over a point of principle but boredom? No chance
Keep an eye on Boris's pulse, or rather his breathing. Several Prime Ministers retired on health grounds, including Eden, Macmillan and Wilson.
I don't think Wilson did so - despite repeated suggestions. When he returned as PM in March 1974 , he made it clear to those close to him that he would not be serving a full term - also indicated by failure to return to No.10. Suggestions of mental decline are contradicted by the work he undertook after leaving office - a further set of memoirs plus other books , chairing a Commission into the City , broadcasting and worldwide lectures. In so far as he was no longer as sharp as he had been, it was likely to have been the natural ageing process - ie being 60plus rather than 50. Early signs of dementia did not appear until the mid-1980s.
Corrects one of my misapprehensions then. I thought he'd resigned due to feeling the very early symptoms of 'losing it'. When I ask myself why I think this, the answer is "well I just thought he did". I wonder how many other misapprehensions of this nature I labour under?
He may well have become somewhat paranoid - but that is surely a seperate issue.
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
The BBC should be making the distinction.
It should be explaining and examining the government's actions in the round, not acting as a government spokesman.
Why? Why should it?
This is an article about guidelines. Why should it need to explain the difference between guidelines and law? The words mean different things and they used the right words.
You made a mistake and misread the article. Stop digging a hole.
Strange response. Of course the BBC should be making the distinction. It is there to inform. Not to support the government's position which was clearly set out by @Ishmael_Z although to be fair it is obvious to everyone apart from small children.
Shared values matter to a continent coming to terms with its past. They also matter for a continent that increasingly tries to influence the world, portraying itself as a global power. Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and the bloc’s most impish critic, sees two paths for the eu. Either it becomes more of a “mission”, going forth and evangelising European values globally, or it becomes a “monastery” and preaches only to Europeans within its precincts.
Reasons leaders have departed early before facing an election....
1) Total political failure (Eden, Cameron) 2) An obvious electoral liability (May, IDS) 3) Outstayed their welcome after a long stint (Thatcher, Blair) 4) Health (Macmillan, Wilson, Churchill, Gaitskill, Smith)
The others leaders left after defeat (some after hanging on too long). So where does that leave Boris going before 2024? Most like 4, then 2, then 1. I suspect if defeat become likely he will not hang around to take the humiliation.
Reasons leaders have departed early before facing an election....
1) Total political failure (Eden, Cameron) 2) An obvious electoral liability (May, IDS) 3) Outstayed their welcome after a long stint (Thatcher, Blair) 4) Health (Macmillan, Wilson, Churchill, Gaitskill, Smith)
The others leaders left after defeat (some after hanging on too long). So where does that leave Boris going before 2024? Most like 4, then 2, then 1. I suspect if defeat become likely he will not hang around to take the humiliation.
Eden was also unwell - though I do not believe Wilson resigned due to health concerns.
In Eden's case, the illness definitely effected his decisions, which led to the political failiure.
In what's essentially a straight two-party fight, you have to believe that the Opposition is going to get Buggins' turn sooner or later. If it does then the incentive for reform necessarily evaporates.
Looking at the USA I wonder if there is a natural inclination to drift to two balanced parties each with approximately 50% support? i.e. the party with
Not when ideology gets in the way.
Labour may be too wedded to metrocentric wokeism to win it the votes it needs in England for some years to come - and the consequent prospect of having to lean on SNP support to get back into Government won't help it to recover lost support either.
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
The BBC should be making the distinction.
It should be explaining and examining the government's actions in the round, not acting as a government spokesman.
Why? Why should it?
This is an article about guidelines. Why should it need to explain the difference between guidelines and law? The words mean different things and they used the right words.
You made a mistake and misread the article. Stop digging a hole.
Strange response. Of course the BBC should be making the distinction. It is there to inform. Not to support the government's position which was clearly set out by @Ishmael_Z although to be fair it is obvious to everyone apart from small children.
It is informing what the new guidelines are.
If you want to be informed what the word guidelines means then consult a dictionary.
People expecting (hoping) Boris steps down are underestimating the ego of politicians especially at the highest level. Has it ever happened before?
OK they stand down rsather than be sacked or sometimes over a point of principle but boredom? No chance
Keep an eye on Boris's pulse, or rather his breathing. Several Prime Ministers retired on health grounds, including Eden, Macmillan and Wilson.
I don't think Wilson did so - despite repeated suggestions. When he returned as PM in March 1974 , he made it clear to those close to him that he would not be serving a full term - also indicated by failure to return to No.10. Suggestions of mental decline are contradicted by the work he undertook after leaving office - a further set of memoirs plus other books , chairing a Commission into the City , broadcasting and worldwide lectures. In so far as he was no longer as sharp as he had been, it was likely to have been the natural ageing process - ie being 60plus rather than 50. Early signs of dementia did not appear until the mid-1980s.
Corrects one of my misapprehensions then. I thought he'd resigned due to feeling the very early symptoms of 'losing it'. When I ask myself why I think this, the answer is "well I just thought he did". I wonder how many other misapprehensions of this nature I labour under?
He may well have become somewhat paranoid - but that is surely a seperate issue.
The Lib Dems need to make a deal with Keir Starmer, in return for the implementation of STV. Simple as that.
And the SNP need to make a deal with Keir Starmer on a referendum on independence.
The two demands go together.
If the Scots get independence then the Labour needs STV to avoid permanent Tory hegemony in England and Wales.
STV prevents the SNP from winning disproportionate numbers of MPs. I don't know how Labour have done with STV in Scottish local elections, but I'd have thought it's one of their best chances of a recovery in Westminster elections in Scotland.
STV in England and Wales would be implemented after the Scots get independence. It would be up to the Scots what system they adopt subsequently.
STV would likely prevent there ever being a majority Labour government again, just as for the Tories.
The LDs and occasionally the Brexit Party or another UKIP style party would always be Kingmakers
Once we were out of the straightjacket of FPTP the party system would most likely splinter and we would have far more parties than we do now and therefore far more possible coalition combinations.
The Conservatives have undoubtedly been the main beneficiary from our unrepresentative voting system, same as the GOP has clearly been the main beneficiary of the bias inherent in the Electoral College. What a coincidence!
The Govt guidance forms part of one's social contract right now. Better to try and stick to it whenever possible in my opinion; most others have concluded the same at the moment.
In what's essentially a straight two-party fight, you have to believe that the Opposition is going to get Buggins' turn sooner or later. If it does then the incentive for reform necessarily evaporates.
Looking at the USA I wonder if there is a natural inclination to drift to two balanced parties each with approximately 50% support? i.e. the party with
Not when ideology gets in the way.
Labour may be too wedded to metrocentric wokeism to win it the votes it needs in England for some years to come - and the consequent prospect of having to lean on SNP support to get back into Government won't help it to recover lost support either.
Which is why Labour ideally needs to pick up 20 to 30 SNP seats in Scotland and for the LDs to win 20 to 30 Tory seats in London and the South for Starmer to become PM
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demonstrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them.
The "Tories" are simply highlighting Starmer's hypocritical prolier than thou fibs: pretending to be working class when he is no such thing.
The wider point is that the SNP line that England is full of posho snobs is simply not true. In fact having an upper class background is a severe disadvantage, particularly in politics.
In what way is Starmer pretending to be working class?
That said, anyone who believes that being upper calss is a disadvantage clearly does not live anywhere near the real world!
I think David is right on this. The problem is who takes over. Sunak seems the obvious choice, but will he be once the tough decisions start to be made? The lack of talent in the Cabinet is truly something to behold. No wonder Sajid and Hunt are already on manouevres.
Sajid is a talentless no hoper, if he is the one then Starmer is a dead cert. Sunak looks the part at this point and if he continues as he is now he will be the top Tory by a mile. Hunt is about the only other one that sounds half competent. Going to be tough for Tories to hang on once Brexit piles the crap on top of the virus expenditure , I would not bet someone else's money on Tories at this point.
I'd go further than that and say that speculating about 2024 is essentially pointless. Not only have we no idea what the economic situation will look like by that point, we don't even know if the country as presently constituted will still exist.
I for one hope it is not, the sooner we are independent the better.
On this day in 1964 I married my beloved at St Gerardine's Church in Lossiemouth
Congratulations to you both. Alec Douglas-Home was then PM.
The Lib Dems need to make a deal with Keir Starmer, in return for the implementation of STV. Simple as that.
And the SNP need to make a deal with Keir Starmer on a referendum on independence.
The two demands go together.
If the Scots get independence then the Labour needs STV to avoid permanent Tory hegemony in England and Wales.
STV prevents the SNP from winning disproportionate numbers of MPs. I don't know how Labour have done with STV in Scottish local elections, but I'd have thought it's one of their best chances of a recovery in Westminster elections in Scotland.
STV in England and Wales would be implemented after the Scots get independence. It would be up to the Scots what system they adopt subsequently.
STV would likely prevent there ever being a majority Labour government again, just as for the Tories.
The LDs and occasionally the Brexit Party or another UKIP style party would always be Kingmakers
Once we were out of the straightjacket of FPTP the party system would most likely splinter and we would have far more parties than we do now and therefore far more possible coalition combinations.
The Conservatives have undoubtedly been the main beneficiary from our unrepresentative voting system, same as the GOP has clearly been the main beneficiary of the bias inherent in the Electoral College. What a coincidence!
Without FPTP though and with PR there would have been no Attlee majority Government in 1945 or 1950 or Wilson majority Government in 1964 or 1966 and even no New Labour majority in 1997 and zero chance of Corbyn ever even getting close to winning a majority at a general election as he was in 2017.
Every elected GOP President until Trump has also got over 50% of the vote at least once, Bill Clinton however never got over 50%
In what's essentially a straight two-party fight, you have to believe that the Opposition is going to get Buggins' turn sooner or later. If it does then the incentive for reform necessarily evaporates.
Looking at the USA I wonder if there is a natural inclination to drift to two balanced parties each with approximately 50% support? i.e. the party with
Balanced parties isn't the first term that springs to mind with regard to the USA..
On your actual point, aren't self defined independent voters the 2nd largest voting group in the USA? If parties with <50% should be tacking towards the centre to appeal to them, there's not much evidence of it on at least one side of the divide.
I think David is right on this. The problem is who takes over. Sunak seems the obvious choice, but will he be once the tough decisions start to be made? The lack of talent in the Cabinet is truly something to behold. No wonder Sajid and Hunt are already on manouevres.
Sajid is a talentless no hoper, if he is the one then Starmer is a dead cert. Sunak looks the part at this point and if he continues as he is now he will be the top Tory by a mile. Hunt is about the only other one that sounds half competent. Going to be tough for Tories to hang on once Brexit piles the crap on top of the virus expenditure , I would not bet someone else's money on Tories at this point.
I'd go further than that and say that speculating about 2024 is essentially pointless. Not only have we no idea what the economic situation will look like by that point, we don't even know if the country as presently constituted will still exist.
I for one hope it is not, the sooner we are independent the better.
On this day in 1964 I married my beloved at St Gerardine's Church in Lossiemouth
Congratulations to you both. Alec Douglas-Home was then PM.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Starmer has unquestionably achieved more personally than any other UK political leader for a very long time. To find another leader who started where he did and arrived where he is now would be a tough task until you get to people like Major, Heath, Kinnock, Callaghan and Wilson. Of them, perhaps only Wilson can match what Starmer achieved before he entered politics. Tories who wish to portray him as posh should continue to do so, in my view. They merely demonstrate just how little they understand working class aspiration.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demonstrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them.
The "Tories" are simply highlighting Starmer's hypocritical prolier than thou fibs: pretending to be working class when he is no such thing.
The wider point is that the SNP line that England is full of posho snobs is simply not true. In fact having an upper class background is a severe disadvantage, particularly in politics.
In what way is Starmer pretending to be working class?
That said, anyone who believes that being upper calss is a disadvantage clearly does not live anywhere near the real world!
Come now, think of the privations and travails these poor souls had to endure, with Eton & Oxford educated BJ bravely leading the way.
'Two-thirds of Boris Johnson's cabinet went to private schools'
I think David is right on this. The problem is who takes over. Sunak seems the obvious choice, but will he be once the tough decisions start to be made? The lack of talent in the Cabinet is truly something to behold. No wonder Sajid and Hunt are already on manouevres.
Sajid is a talentless no hoper, if he is the one then Starmer is a dead cert. Sunak looks the part at this point and if he continues as he is now he will be the top Tory by a mile. Hunt is about the only other one that sounds half competent. Going to be tough for Tories to hang on once Brexit piles the crap on top of the virus expenditure , I would not bet someone else's money on Tories at this point.
I'd go further than that and say that speculating about 2024 is essentially pointless. Not only have we no idea what the economic situation will look like by that point, we don't even know if the country as presently constituted will still exist.
I for one hope it is not, the sooner we are independent the better.
On this day in 1964 I married my beloved at St Gerardine's Church in Lossiemouth
Congratulations to you both. Alec Douglas-Home was then PM.
DH is right that the Tory party is pretty swift to defenestrate a leader looking likely to lose an election.
I have never been a Boris fan. He has always looked the bumbling amateur public school boy who bullshits his way through life.
It got Blair three election victories, didn't it?
And being thoughtful oiks got Brown and May precisely nowhere, after some initial successes.
You could easily make a case that the country likes being led by people who make them feel more optimistic, especially when the circumstances don't justify it. For my money, we've had two leaders like that in the past two decades (Blair and Johnson), and two who clearly weren't (Brown and May). Cameron is somewhere between, hence his mediocre but not disastrous electoral record.
? Perhaps my antennae aren't as developed as those of the class obsessed English, but to me Blair always gave the impression of suppressing his public school background, appeared anything but bumbling and his adoption of estuarine tones was the opposite of Johnson's Classical pretensions.
Is that the same Tony Blair that went to public school in... Scotland?
I'm sure that would be a killer point if I could work out what it was.
He was infected by Scottishness?
There used to be a trio of stripper bars in the West Port in Edinburgh known colloquially as the pubic triangle, similarly Fettes, Edinburgh Academy and Stewart's Melville could be described as the public school triangle (though you can probably randomly chuck a triangle onto a map of Edinburgh and come up with 3 private schools). I'd venture that there was a good deal more Scottishness in the former than the latter.
So the Scots who are either posh, or class-aware aren't 'properly Scottish'. That makes more sense as a definition. I wonder what you'd do with these non-Scottish Scots in your brave new Scotland? Ship them all off to the a remote Hebridean Island maybe? Edinburgh would look funny empty.
Lucky , no matter how much you protest it is plain to anyone that Scotland is far less class conscious than England. We have our share , much smaller, of hoorays but in general people don't have the doff your cap/they are better than me attitude that you see down south.
It is awareness that we're speaking of Malc, not necessarily 'kowtowing'. Complaining about the poshos in the big house (or complaining about the local neds) is as much awareness of the class system as the deferential behaviour you describe.
Lucky , I disagree, you have the poshos v neds in all countries but few have the ingrained social structure that still pervades England. We saw that in bold on here as Starmer was deemed an absolute pleb due to the schools he had attended and fact his parents were not of the correct class yet absolute arseholes are feted because they are from the right stock and went to Eton/Cambridge/Oxford etc. There is nothing near that attitude in Scotland.
Starmer went to private school, has an Oxford degree and is a knight of the realm.
On that basis he is the poshest party leader since Douglas Home
Don't get all isam on us. He went to a grammar school which became fee paying while he was there. Did they say existing students didn't need to pay? No idea. My guess is yes.
Reigate grammar school was an independence school for most of the time Starmer was there
But not when he started.
And that's the point. His parents didn't send him to a private school. They chose to send him to a grammar school or rather he got into a grammar school under his own efforts by virtue of passing the 11+. What was he to say at 14 or whenever - Mum/Dad, with a name like "Keir" I can't continue to go there now it's become fee paying for new entrants, so couldn't you send me instead to Reigate secondary modern so that I can take a CSE in metalwork?
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
IDS went to a secondary modern in Solihull, not a posh private school like Starmer's ultimately was.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
Starmer has unquestionably achieved more personally than any other UK political leader for a very long time. To find another leader who started where he did and arrived where he is now would be a tough task until you get to people like Major, Heath, Kinnock, Callaghan and Wilson. Of them, perhaps only Wilson can match what Starmer achieved before he entered politics. Tories who wish to portray him as posh should continue to do so, in my view. They merely demonstrate just how little they understand working class aspiration.
Michael Howard was also a top barrister and went to a grammar school, Ted Heath came top of the civil service exams and went to grammar school and William Hague went to a comprehensive school and then got a first from Oxford and worked for McKinsey and Co an elite management consultants
There is no question Starmer is an upgrade to Corbyn but i'm not so sure he will have anything like the appeal.
The 'forensic' approach is going to be a turn-off for an electorate primed on snappy soundbites, cliches and generalisations.
Starmer is the political equivalent of a 50 page T&C's section on an insurance policy.
I think that rather depends on where "snappy soundbites, cliches and generalisations" have got us by the next GE. You might be right but I can also see a distinct possibility that the public might be ready to try a more sober type of leader.
Boris's cheery jokey optimism suited the narrative of getting Brexit done. Leavers were heavily invested in wanting to believe it was going to be a great success. Boris validated what they wanted to hear, after all 2020 was going to be a great year.
Although clearly not simply down to Boris that prediction looks laughable now
Will the same style go down as well with 10% unemployed and an economy on the ropes? I'm guessing not.
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Maybe for us on here but for the casual browser less so.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
It literally says it in the very first paragraph that explains the new rules in black and white.
You are proving my point for me. Are "rules" guidance or the law?
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The rules are guidelines as the article says.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
The article says this:
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
No it explicitly wasn't. If you think it was the provide the previous guidelines (which is what this article is about) that says it was previously allowed.
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
The BBC should be making the distinction.
It should be explaining and examining the government's actions in the round, not acting as a government spokesman.
Why? Why should it?
This is an article about guidelines. Why should it need to explain the difference between guidelines and law? The words mean different things and they used the right words.
You made a mistake and misread the article. Stop digging a hole.
Strange response. Of course the BBC should be making the distinction. It is there to inform. Not to support the government's position which was clearly set out by @Ishmael_Z although to be fair it is obvious to everyone apart from small children.
It is informing what the new guidelines are.
If you want to be informed what the word guidelines means then consult a dictionary.
It says they are"rules". Because no one is going to misinterpret that as "Rule of Law" are they now.
The Lib Dems need to make a deal with Keir Starmer, in return for the implementation of STV. Simple as that.
And the SNP need to make a deal with Keir Starmer on a referendum on independence.
The two demands go together.
If the Scots get independence then the Labour needs STV to avoid permanent Tory hegemony in England and Wales.
STV prevents the SNP from winning disproportionate numbers of MPs. I don't know how Labour have done with STV in Scottish local elections, but I'd have thought it's one of their best chances of a recovery in Westminster elections in Scotland.
STV in England and Wales would be implemented after the Scots get independence. It would be up to the Scots what system they adopt subsequently.
Electoral reform will only come if and when Labour is absolutely convinced that it can never, ever win a majority under FPTP again - yet can scrape together a coalition to remove the Tories for long enough to make it happen. Thus, if Scotland goes, the likelihood of reform down South becomes more, not less, remote.
In what's essentially a straight two-party fight, you have to believe that the Opposition is going to get Buggins' turn sooner or later. If it does then the incentive for reform necessarily evaporates. If it doesn't, and we end up with a Japanese-style one-and-a-half party system in England, then Labour may never get the chance to make the change.
There is only one window for STV reform. That is a minority Labour government before Scottish Independence that has to give the go=ahead for a referendum in order to form a minority government, and realises that it has to introduce STV (with SNP support) to avoid never being in power (as a minority government) again. Does that make sense?
If we assume for one moment that the evil of social distancing will not be inflicted upon us for all time, then clearly the point will come when there is a lot of pent-up demand for pubs to profit from. With this in mind, I'm sure that many - especially the tied houses of large breweries - will return. However, an awful lot of free houses and pubs that were only marginally profitable before this all kicked off have had it (with the caveat that some could be rescued by community groups.)
But yes, I imagine that quite a lot of them will end up derelict or being converted into houses.
Comments
Little Gaddesden
Hemel Hempstead
Alresford
Chandlers Ford
and a Year in the Winchester Royal Hotel
spent lot of time in London but only in hotels, never lived there.
It's all about the policies.
You are the one being HYUFD like but where HYUFD worships opinion polls you are doing the same with the law as if only the law is relevant. There's more to life than opinion polls or the law. The media doesn't just report the law. If only law changes were reported there wouldn't be very much at all for the media to report on would there?
Being able to exercise multiple times per day IS NEW within the coronavirus guidance. The media reports a whole lot more on coronavirus as a whole than it does changes in the law so the guidance changing is newsworthy.
"Individuals in England are now allowed to meet with one other person from outside their household if they stay outdoors"
That is simply inaccurate; they always could.
https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-hogewey-dementia-village-2017-7
Though my Mother in Law is very well looked after in a care home setting. She does crafts most afternoons. She is not distressed by her dementia, more amiably muddled.
Where does it reference law? You are the one trying to make it about law ... that quote doesn't mention the law.
Total political dynamite in parts of Wales if you start building reservoirs willy nilly.
I would have expected the BBC to put the new guidance into context.
I found out the following -
- Resevoir in question was to re-work uninhabited land, including an old, closed gravel pit.
- Plan was basically, to build a lake. No visible installations.
- When I asked why oppose, was told it Is Bad For The Environment.
- Asked bad how.
- After some to and fro. Apparently All The Works Of Man Are Evil.
- Pointing out that the population is increasing is racist. apparently.
- It is Middle Class thinking to think that more water for more people is the way to go.
And for the avoidance of doubt he also chose to go to a redbrick university (Leeds) as an undergraduate. They didn't give out first class honours there like confetti in those days, so the fact that he got one and went to Oxbridge for his masters on the back of it is all the more impressive.
If PB Tories want to portray someone who has demostrated such personal achievement as instead having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, aka Cameron, Johnson et al, more fool them. I hope the Tories try the same in 2024, because if they do they'll have been reduced to clutching at straws.
If the quote says from "it is now legal ..." then that would be inaccurate but it doesn't say that. You are the one reading law into it where law isn't even mentioned.
If you want to discuss context then provide the link to the full article and we can discuss that.
May was also mainly state educated and Thatcher and Heath and Major, Howard and Hague all went to state schools.
Starmer is certainly posher than all Tory leaders for the last 50 years bar Boris and Cameron but he is a knight of the realm unlike them.
He is also posher than any Labour leader since Blair
It is an article on the BBC mobile app under "here's some advice on the rules on exercising".
And I agree about the mendacity of the message. Done? If only.
As for tracking Italy, that is definitely not the way to go - but at least we'll win the World Cup at some point.
The law is the law. The rules are guidance. If the article said "here's some advice on the laws on exercising" you'd be right. It doesn't.
You can break the rules without breaking the law.
In what's essentially a straight two-party fight, you have to believe that the Opposition is going to get Buggins' turn sooner or later. If it does then the incentive for reform necessarily evaporates. If it doesn't, and we end up with a Japanese-style one-and-a-half party system in England, then Labour may never get the chance to make the change.
France and Spain, home to large numbers of UK migrant workers and retired people, are deemed not to have done anything proactive to raise awareness among British residents. The Czech Republic and Hungary have published information that is thought to be confusing or out-of-date, without translation into English. In contrast – the government says – information on the settlement scheme for EU nationals in the UK is available in other EU languages. In Austria and Slovenia the government is concerned British nationals have only six or seven months to secure their rights, whereas EU nationals in the UK have 27 months.
Other EU member states, such as Malta, Cyprus and Slovakia, are faulted for relying on face-to-face meetings with local officials, rather than offering people the option to secure their status online.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/15/brexit-serious-risk-eu-uk-citizens-michael-gove
It specifically says at the top of it "the new guidelines" not "the new law". That sets the context.
Support of it is irrelevant when nobody, me and you included, really understands what effect it will have in both the short and long term on every day life.
Actually the article says "rules".
Very confusing for many people.
https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Another-Mountain-to-Climb.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/news/vote2001/hi/english/newsid_1195000/1195057.stm
You say you can well believe it because he is "athletic" and "all muscle".
I would like you to reflect on that comment. I know it was late, but still.
Clue: it is referring to the guidelines.
The wider point is that the SNP line that England is full of posho snobs is simply not true. In fact having an upper class background is a severe disadvantage, particularly in politics.
The law is the law. This isn't an article about the law. If it wanted to say law it would say law.
"This easing only applies to two individuals from separate households"
"This easing".
But it was always the case.
Your obsession with Keir’s “poshness” is very weird though, I feel it’s something you should get over.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
You're comparing apples with oranges. New guidelines need to be compared with old guidelines while new laws need to be compared with old laws.
*Lights blue touch paper and retires*
https://twitter.com/thetimes/status/1261582420152852483?s=21
It should be explaining and examining the government's actions in the round, not acting as a government spokesman.
I have no problem with Sir Keir being posh but it does mean the class warriors within Labour cannot play that card anymore
It is abundantly clear what is going on, which is that the govt is deliberately confusing the issue. It wants the rules to look like laws so that people will observe them on pain of punishment, but like voluntary guidelines to the extent that people will observe them out of their own inherent virtue, and get a nice warm and pro-governmental feeling out of it.
This is an article about guidelines. Why should it need to explain the difference between guidelines and law? The words mean different things and they used the right words.
You made a mistake and misread the article. Stop digging a hole.
https://amp.economist.com/briefing/2020/05/14/the-covid-19-pandemic-puts-pressure-on-the-eu?frsc=dg|e&__twitter_impression=true
Labour may be too wedded to metrocentric wokeism to win it the votes it needs in England for some years to come - and the consequent prospect of having to lean on SNP support to get back into Government won't help it to recover lost support either.
If you want to be informed what the word guidelines means then consult a dictionary.
The Conservatives have undoubtedly been the main beneficiary from our unrepresentative voting system, same as the GOP has clearly been the main beneficiary of the bias inherent in the Electoral College. What a coincidence!
That said, anyone who believes that being upper calss is a disadvantage clearly does not live anywhere near the real world!
Every elected GOP President until Trump has also got over 50% of the vote at least once, Bill Clinton however never got over 50%
On your actual point, aren't self defined independent voters the 2nd largest voting group in the USA? If parties with <50% should be tacking towards the centre to appeal to them, there's not much evidence of it on at least one side of the divide.
'Two-thirds of Boris Johnson's cabinet went to private schools'
https://tinyurl.com/y4ymjjrt
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/opinion/british-pubs-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Boris's cheery jokey optimism suited the narrative of getting Brexit done. Leavers were heavily invested in wanting to believe it was going to be a great success. Boris validated what they wanted to hear, after all 2020 was going to be a great year.
Although clearly not simply down to Boris that prediction looks laughable now
Will the same style go down as well with 10% unemployed and an economy on the ropes? I'm guessing not.
e.g. 2: Labour's constant attacks on Cameron and Boris's schooling
But yes, I imagine that quite a lot of them will end up derelict or being converted into houses.