peterms

7 minutes ago, hippo said:

Imagine the uproar - if someone senior ranking said " the next leader must be male and he must come from London"

Why has where the next leader lives become a factor .....bonkers...

But if we recognise that of our 55 Prime Ministers to date, 28 went to Oxford and 20 to Eton...is that ok?

Is it ok if we just allow it without vocalising it?

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

They only lost 400,000 that way, they lost 2 million from the remain camp and there will be plenty more who did vote Labour that may never again

Those figures are wrong, and are based on a tweet which simply netted off some broad figures.  Read the thread.

12 minutes ago, hippo said:

Problem is - you can join labour for £3 now - and vote for the next leader early next year.

That's open to so much abuse its incredible - that's the reason for the delay - to recruit a load of young angrys - who back Rayner/RBL 

Why would it be only these who would join, rather than a wider group of supporters, or even opponents?  In fact, opponents are more likely to afford the higher price.

On 12/12/2019 at 00:53, maqroll said:

I'm adding a "British Butty" to our menu but I've never made one.

I'm going to be using a fresh sourdough bread for it, bacon, butter. Should I also use Worcestershire sauce?

I feel like I need to jazz it up from the basic bread/butter/bacon thing.

 

Thoughts?

Although sourdough is great bread, and a bacon sandwich with Worcester sauce (and fried mushrooms) is a thing of wonder, I wouldn't do it in a commercial setting.  The texture of sourdough means that fat, butter (if you use it, I'm in the "no" camp) and especially Worcester sauce, will fall through the holes.  Big mess, all over the customers.

I would go with a closer-textured bread like granary.

Or else do the sourdough thing, with loads of napkins and washing facilities.

US style health arrangements.  Coming our way?

10 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

The top job ‘has’ to be a woman? That’s language that could work against a female winner that gets there on genuine merit. 

Yes, if it comes across as "only women may apply" rather than "we should aim to appoint a woman if possible", that wouldn't be helpful to anyone appointed.

I understood the phrase "has to be" as an exhortation, not an attempt to set a rule, which would obviously be far beyond the speaker's power in any event.

10 minutes ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

There's meeting requirements and then there's finding the 'best' person for the role. What you appear to be describing is something akin to tokenism which really just serves to undermine the intended goal.

My point is precisely that it is not tokenism, but is often misrepresented as such.

I'm sure that examples of tokenism can be found if you search for them, but probably far fewer than appointments by groupthink, contacts, similarity to existing postholders or stereotypes of "best" candidates and so on.

2 hours ago, colhint said:

Yeah I'll nominate you for the Labour leader.

I'll second that, though it may be advisable to have a mentor for the first couple of years, to guide him in the ways and customs of the party, working with him side by side.

I gather Jeremy may have a bit more time at his disposal soon, and clearly has relevant experience.  It would be a marriage made in heaven.

23 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Remember that time when Labour felt they ‘had’ to have a left winger on the list to be leader? How did that pan out?

Now it ‘has’ to be a woman. It’ll be like the World Cup, 2024 has to be somebody from an ethnic minority, with 2029 being reserved for disabled candidates and 2034 the big opportunity for the LGBTQ community.

Incidentally, if it is a woman, great. But hopefully, she will also be the best candidate.

 

I'm not party to the internal Labour discussions on who should stand for leader.  I have however observed many discussions in many organisations over too many decades, and it very often happens that people aspire to choose someone from an underrepresented group, as long as they meet the requirements of the role, and this is caricatured by others as a determination to select someone based on race or gender regardless of ability.

It's regrettable that positive action is viewed in this way, and it is in my experience also usually a misrepresentation.

6 hours ago, blandy said:

You're technically right, but I find it hard to look at remain (non-Labour) vote going up by nearly 2 million, Tories up by 300K and Labour down by 2.6 million, with a small drop in overall turnout as well, and not conclude that the drift was substantially from Labour to remain, with a smaller switch Labour-Tory. You are right to look at it as "not proof", but were anyone to deny the direction of travel, given the sheer size of the numbers I'd question their reasons why.

Sure some older voters will have died, some will have changed their minds, some young 'uns will have voted for the first time (and many for Labour), but such a big drop in labour votes and big rise in Remain party votes suggests they lost a lot of remainers - 5 times as many as leavers.  Were the numbers in the thousands or 10s of thousands, nationally, then I'd tend to want to look much deeper, but 2.6 million is a very significant number of people.

So, his conclusion was that Labour lost 2m votes to remain parties and 400,000 to leave parties.  Against that conclusion based simply on netting off numbers, there's a rather more thorough analysis here which assesses the numbers like this:

Quote

As noted above, we estimate that over 200,000 2017 Labour Leave voters switched
to the Liberal Democrats, the Greens or the SNP. They can be added to over 1.1
million 2017 Labour Remain voters who switched to Remain parties (mostly the
Liberal Democrats), according to Datapraxis’s estimates based in the published
YouGov MRP numbers from 11 December 2019.
In total, we therefore estimate that over 1.3 million of Labour’s 2017 voters
switched to other Remain parties, while something like 700,000 to 800,000 of its
Leave voters and 300,000 of its Remain voters switched to the Conservatives (the
latter group most likely because of their views on the leadership).

The balance here is suggested as 1.3m to remain parties, and 1m-1.1m to leave parties.

There is then the question of how these lost votes were distributed, and this table suggests why the impact of losing votes to leave parties was so significant in terms of seats, with the loss in the north being greater as a % of vote share than in London and the south east.

The paper is also interesting in discussing the various voting tribes, and their different concerns and motivations.  Worth a read.

4 minutes ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

Starmer is the standout but the 'it must be a woman' meme is very worryingly gaining traction. 

He could simply self-identify.  Problem solved.

4 minutes ago, blandy said:

They deserved to get thrashed. Badly organised, in-fighting, led by a pillock, run by a cult of insular, cushioned, London revolutionaries and Len the utter disgrace

And a very good morning to you too, sir. 

4 hours ago, blandy said:

 

This is a table constructed with a specific conclusion in mind, and we should view it like that rather than as objective.

The election was largely about Brexit, but certainly not only about that, and presenting the votes as being about that issue is misleading.  On a personal level, despite being a Green member, I voted SNP as the best way to unseat the Libdem, because the SNP would enter some post-election arrangement with Labour and the LIbdems would not, and that seemed the best available outcome.  My vote is being claimed as support for remain, and support for Scottish independence; it was neither.  There will be many others who voted for reasons other than simply Brexit.

Beyond that, demographics suggest that those leaving the regsiter through death will have been more leavers, and those coming on to the register more remainers, so you would expect a shift on the leave-remain axis for that reason alone.

Then of course there's the question of how votes actually moved, which the net figures can't show.  The fall in Labour support, for example, will be a combination of switching to each of the other parties in differing degrees, staying at home, dying, offset by new recruits.  A proper analysis of this would be interesting, but the crude figures don't tell us much.

So where he says that discussion must be based on facts, I agree, but his simple conclusion isn't the simple fact that he presents it as.

9 hours ago, blandy said:

Their "policy" was the inevitable result of a fudge between the ones who wanted to remain Abbott, McDonnell, Starmer etc) and those who wanted to leave (Corbyn, McLuskey, Milne). They'd have been better off just going for one thing or the other, at least they could have committedly argued for it.

It's hard to see how that could have been achieved, or why it would make sense.  More than any other party, Labour supporters were a mix of leave and remain.  Its members were more remainers, especially the ones making more use of public platforms and social media. Its MPs included many who thought that coming down as unreservedly leave would cost them their seats, and others thinking the same about remain (and both groups were right).

The idea that a party should be either leave or remain, and be unqualified in that position, may appeal to people who have that view themselves, but for Labour, it would have been self-destructive; even more so than what happened.  As it is, we see the impact on the northern leave-leaning constituencies from Labour having tried to accommodate the "second referendum" lobby, which seems to have left a lot of voters thinking that the position of "respect the result" had been ditched.

In that position, a policy of saying "if you want to leave we will leave, but not on the terms offered by Johnson; and if having seen the best that can be negotiated without the red lines you instead want to remain, we'll do that" makes sense.  It is also a coherent position, despite the fatuous shite in the media about it being incomprehensible.

Expect a bit more of this, like after the referendum.  Far right feeling more confident and becoming more visible.

2 minutes ago, blandy said:

Well, yes. That's right....but if it's the rich that are paying twice, while the poorer are not, then is that bad? It's surely like an additional tax on the rich folk? They pay both tax towards general healthcare and personal insurance for their own future care.

It's not that element which is "wrong", it's the hidden intent (we suspect) isn't it? The "where will it stop"? aspect. The gradual creep of such ideas into "well everyone will get their own insurance in 10, 20 years, while the Taxpayer version is ultimately withered away.

Make it sound vaguely "fair" while sneaking in something that will end up taking away a universal level of cover.

 

Yes, I think that's right.  Three problems with what he said:

It's a lie (which should not surprise us), because it's his proposal that leads to paying twice.

It's a drift, or possibly a leap, towards a US style arrangement, with higher costs and money being siphoned away in profits.

It will create (more of) a two-tier system with much poorer provision for those at the bottom, and easier to cut, much like the way they managed to transform council housing into a residual sector.

28 minutes ago, Risso said:

He said: "We all accept there has to be more money to go into the system. You can pay it just out of general taxation and say it's all free, but that means that people who are currently taxpayers - that are currently 30, 40, 50s now - will have to pay towards their own care at the end of life but also they'll instantly start paying for the older generation's care as well, which I think to put it mildly has fairness implications to it.

"Or you can try some kind of insurance system so that those who can afford to take out an insurance policy should be encouraged to do so, which will buy them peace of mind."

If you accept for a moment his framing that government spending comes from gathering tax in (which is a separate discussion), what he says is wrong.  Since you can't go back in time and create insurance policies for all the people who haven't had them and now need care, than what he proposes is that those in work should now pay for their own insurance for the future, while those who haven't had insurance will still need to be provided for from general government spending.  So it is his proposal that people should now start paying for their own future care, while also continuing to pay for the care of those who haven't had decades of insurance policies building up.  It is his proposal that creates the "paying twice" scenario, not the current system.  Or does he mean that these insurance policies should be paid for by cutting the tax of those taking them out so that we abandon national insurance in favour of personal insurance - in which case, there is a loss of the government revenue which he sees as paying for care costs?

6 minutes ago, PompeyVillan said:

This morning he is talking about investing in the NHS, schools and whatnot. And he's saying that he wants to look after the ex industrial towns that have for the first time voted for the Conservatives. 

3 minutes ago, cyrusr said:

Right, so what are everyone’s predictions then?

Im going for 18 seat majority for Tories.

Hung parliament,  Swinson loses seat, minority parties do a deal with Corbyn, wonderful radical new policies introduced that win over his doubters, @blandy leads crowdfunding drive to erect a statue in his honour.

Voted SNP, as the best bet to get rid of the Libdem locally.

Representative for Wellingborough.

4 hours ago, Chindie said:

It's not quite the masterpiece it's made out to be from a quick scan.

It repeats the same old stuff we've heard again and again, much debunked, and appears it falls into it's own trap of conflating Israel and Jewish which is itself anti-Semitic.

Yes, it's very much the same old stuff.  Though I could only get half way through.