Vote wisely.

[tamada]

Assuming, by the above argument, that the decent majority that Boris's maladministration possessed similar weight when it came to the pollution of select committees, how come things turned out so rubbish for the Tory collective?

Twenty-six years eh? Half of which was being active in a (mostly) elected administration that has now (mostly) imploded, and reckons his observations and recommendations are salient? To me, it appears that he, among many, hasn't learned a thing.

Asleep at the wheel is not just a West Virginian country and western band.

[tamada]

If Starmer rules like Blair or does nothing radical and keeps the cancel culture nitwits at bay,

So if he kowtows to the USA, takes the UK into an illegal war and walks away after ensuring his financial future he will be an acceptable PM.
Hindsight Starmer
"My father was a toolmaker", no he wasn't he owned a company that employed toolmakers.
Hindsight has defended terrorists as a lawyer, ignored Asian rape gangs as the top doggy in the CPS and now claims to have only supported Corbyn and the rest of the Arab terrorist organisations supporters who are still running Liebour because he did not think he would win?
Hindsight and Clair (the sneer) will never be anything but political opportunists. God help the UK.

There's still hope. Starmer hasn't exactly gotten all warm and fuzzy over Diane Abbott's self-styled political renaissance (yet).

[Laan Yaa Mo]

The boycott of Baillie Gifford is important in that it signals that the loony (radical) left is on the move again with a new boycott strategy. Starmer should be able to contain the threat, and it would be silly for the Conservatives to show any support for them. Here's the issue:

DANIEL FINKELSTEIN
Baillie Gifford is just the start for radical left
Growing boycott movement will be one of Starmer’s big challenges — Tories, authors and business must help him win it

Tuesday June 18 2024, 5.00pm BST, The Times

What does opposing fossil fuels have to do with opposing the state of Israel? Answer that question and it will help you to understand not only the future of the book festival but also the future of the radical left. Because Keir Starmer has forced the radical left to find a new strategy. And combining book festivals, fossil fuel protests and boycotting Israel is it.

Since the creation of the Labour Party, the radical left has been ambivalent about it. Sometimes they attack it from the outside, sometimes they try to take it over.

In the 1960s, for instance, they organised via small Marxist parties and wrote pamphlets explaining why parliamentary socialism was impossible. Then in the 1970s they tried conquering Labour by radicalising the trade unions and winning a majority on its national executive. The prime minister, Jim Callaghan, found that party policy was being set by a committee of left-wing activists and that the party had appointed as its youth officer an open advocate of revolutionary Marxism.

• Attacks on sponsors an existential threat to arts, says Robertson

In the 1980s the radical tide gradually retreated and the left was beached once again. Only in 2015 did they return, with Jeremy Corbyn’s victory attracting back into the party radicals who had remained outside for two decades.

One of the most encouraging and impressive things that Starmer has done in preparing for this election has been to defeat these people and take back control of the party. And to use the right’s dominance of the national executive to remove radical left-wing parliamentary candidates. He has unquestionably strengthened his prospective government by doing this.

Baillie Gifford was targeted because it hardly has any fossil-fuel investments

There have been some complaints, even from the mainstream, about the ruthless tactics that have been used. Some of the grounds for removing candidates have been pretty weak and transparently factional. But I have no real argument with it.

You don’t need to read Labour’s history under Harold Wilson and Callaghan to appreciate how disruptive it can be to have a powerful force in parliament that is fundamentally at variance with a government of its own party. You can also see what has happened to the Conservative Party. All that nonsense about the European Research Group’s “star chamber” and meetings of the (cringe) “five families” has been a major contributor to the size of the coming defeat.

Starmer and his allies have acted in a way that gives them the best chance of presenting their new government as united, serious and moderate. But obviously, removing key members of the radical left from candidacies doesn’t mean the radical left will disappear altogether. So what will they do instead?

In 2022, one of the main drivers of the left pressure group Momentum and a key ally of Corbyn, James Schneider, published a book called Our Bloc: How We Win. In it he sets out the strategy he proposes given Starmer’s takeover of the party. And central to that is linkage.

• Keir Starmer: Labour will not impose top-flight transfer levy to fund pyramid

What he imagines is a loose network of organisations and causes with some common back-office support. The radical left would grab attention with creative stunts, disruptive boycotts, public performance, the use of social media, well publicised strikes. Disparate causes would link together.

Schneider’s imagination was vivid enough to allow him to dream that, through this method, the left would win power, either with Labour or without it. But however unrealistic its final goal, it is possible to see Schneider’s strategy playing out already.

The Fossil Free Books campaign, which forced the investment management firm Baillie Gifford out of sponsoring book festivals, is a good example. It combines performance, the use of peer pressure and the linking of apparently unrelated causes.

Most of the coverage of the attack on book festival sponsorship has suggested that the campaigners oppose Baillie Gifford because it invests in fossil fuels and Israel. I think this has it the wrong way round. What is actually happening is that the protesters oppose fossil fuels and Israel because they are being invested in by Baillie Gifford.

In other words, the target is the people who manage investments, and the very idea of investment. The target is capitalism. And the aim is to create a political force capable of challenging Starmer inside and outside of parliament.

Israel and fossil fuels are indeed connected. What connects them is Baillie Gifford. This is the reason why Fossil Free Books doesn’t focus on, say, Iran, which would be a much more obvious target for a campaign trying to reduce oil production.

To believe that book festivals can simply move on to a different, “cleaner” sponsor is to misunderstand what is happening. Baillie Gifford was chosen as a target precisely because it hardly has any investments in fossil fuels or Israel. If that firm can be driven out, almost any sponsor can.

And what of the observation that lack of sponsorship might lead book festivals to close? This isn’t an eventuality that would embarrass the protesters. It is a desired outcome. The aim is to degrade life under capitalism so that the system begins to crumble.

The fact that this — bringing down capitalism one book festival at a time — appears ludicrous doesn’t mean it isn’t the aim. The same people thought Corbyn could win a general election, after all. And it doesn’t mean it won’t represent a serious challenge. So having won his battle against the radical left while out of office, Starmer will now have to win it again while in office. (This isn’t an argument against voting Labour by the way, as the radical left campaign would be just as bad, if not worse, were the Tories to win. I’m concentrating on Labour because the Tories won’t win.)

Starmer will have to be robust against protest movements, resolute when leftwingers try to harass his MPs and shame his donors, an ally to the arts when their funding is targeted. He will have to stay strong against strikes and be clear about the limits of extra-parliamentary action.

And the rest of us will have to stay strong, too. The Tories, for instance, will have to resist the temptation as an opposition to show sympathy with extra-parliamentary action when it is aimed at the other party. As it was with the tanker-driver dispute.

More important still is that business resists. If the resolve of business collapses every time a boycott is threatened or there is some bad publicity in The Guardian, it will encourage the protests. Baillie Gifford has, quite unnecessarily, granted the radical left a great victory. Other festivals and sponsors need to be braver than Hay-on-Wye.

And authors who buckle and join boycotts should appreciate what they are contributing to. That they are supporting a broad attack on all sponsorship, with the inevitable consequence that it will bring all sponsorship to an end.

The protesters, of course, will scoff at this. They will assert that they are just attacking obvious individual injustices. But don’t believe them. They know exactly what they are doing. Because this is how linkage works.

[tamada]

According to NOT the Guardian...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... -predicts/

PS: "Meanwhile Reform, despite a surge in the polls, is predicted to get zero seats. For Nigel Farage, the recently returned Reform leader, it would mean an eighth defeat in a row as a parliamentary candidate."

Nigel and Reform: the best friends the LibDems ever had.

[AlexO]

I would be very surprised if the yellow parts of Scotland are quite as large as the predictions shown. The voting public in Scotland have cottoned on to the fact that the SNP are just a bunch of lying charlatans hiding behind a fictional image of an independent Scotland.

[tamada]

I would be very surprised if the yellow parts of Scotland are quite as large as the predictions shown. The voting public in Scotland have cottoned on to the fact that the SNP are just a bunch of lying charlatans hiding behind a fictional image of an independent Scotland.

Those huge, yellow tracts are pretty sparsely populated an' sheep an' heilan' coos cannae vote. I see Tories ruling the roost in the northeast though, just like when I were a lad and Alex Salmond was spleet new and came along to burst their bubble.

The SNP, like their policies, are unsustainable.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Will Labour's wishy-washy policy on women have any impact on the female vote? Let's see. What is the alterative for women. Perhaps the Conservatives. Do they have any policies yet? Vote wisely, ladies.

JK Rowling: Labour has turned its back on women
Author says she does not trust Sir Keir Starmer’s judgment and would struggle to vote for the party of which she was
Steven Swinford, Political Editor | Oliver Wright, Policy Editor | Geraldine Scott, Senior Political Correspondent
Friday June 21 2024, 9.00pm BST, The Times

JK Rowling says that her campaign is not about denying trans women’s rights but the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries

JK Rowling has accused Sir Keir Starmer of “abandoning women” who are concerned about transgender rights.

In an article for The Times, the Harry Potter author criticises the Labour leader for a “dismissive and often offensive” approach to feminist concerns.

She says she would struggle to vote for a party of which she was once a member because she does not trust Starmer’s judgment and has a “poor opinion” of his character.

• JK Rowling: Labour has dismissed women like me. I’ll struggle to vote for it

“As long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights their foremothers thought were won for all time, I’ll struggle to support them,” she says. “The women who wouldn’t wheesht [be quiet] didn’t leave Labour. Labour abandoned them.”

Rowling’s intervention comes after Starmer used a televised interview to signal a shift in his position on transgender rights, an issue that has split ­Labour and caused him significant political discomfort. He had previously criticised Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP who campaigns on women rights, for saying that only women have a cervix. In 2021 he said her comments were “something that shouldn’t be said and were not right”.

On Thursday Starmer said he now agreed with Sir Tony Blair, the former Labour leader, that “biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis”. Asked about his previous comments on Duffield, he said that the debate at the time had become “very toxic, very divided, very hard line”.

Starmer has failed to defend Rosie Duffield, who is running for re-election in Canterbury, against a long-running campaign of threats and abuse

Rowling, 58, says that Starmer has done nothing to allay her concerns about his position, attacking him in particular for failing to defend Duffield, who has suffered death threats.

“Rosie has received literally no support from Starmer over the threats and abuse, some of which has originated from within the Labour Party itself, and has had a severe, measurable impact on her life,” she says.

“The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line, in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Tony Blair.”

Rowling says that her campaign is not about denying trans women’s rights but ensuring that these are not at the expense of women and girls.

“For left-leaning women like us, this isn’t, and never has been, about trans people enjoying the rights of every other citizen, and being free to present and identify however they wish,” she says. “This is about the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries. It’s about freedom of speech and observable truth. It’s about waiting, with dwindling hope, for the left to wake up to the fact that its lazy embrace of a quasi- religious ideology is having calamitous consequences.”

She highlights a book, to which she contributed, that included a piece by a mother “smeared as a bigot and a transphobe” for wanting female-only intimate care for her disabled daughter.

Rowling says: “If you choose to prevaricate and patronise rather than ­address her concerns, if you continue to insist that the most vulnerable must embrace your luxury beliefs, no matter the cost to themselves, I don’t trust your judgment and I have a poor opinion of your character.”

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar ... -5n60z80wl

[Laan Yaa Mo]

J.K. Rowling has convinced me that Starmer is not up to the task. Can you imagine Tony Blair had to sit him down and explain the difference between a man and a woman. What are the options then? The Scunthorpe athletic supporter has put forward Mr. Farage as a viable choice; however, he will achieve nothing more than reducing the Conservative vote. Rowling may have it right by suggesting to cast your vote for the best local candidate. Starmer is wobbly and cannot be trusted.

JK Rowling: Labour has dismissed women like me. I’ll struggle to vote for it

Keir Starmer has failed to convince me that his party has changed its position on the rights of women — it struggles to say what a woman is at all

JK Rowling
Friday June 21 2024, 9.00pm BST, The Times

On Thursday evening, I went to the best book launch I’ve ever attended, and I’m including all of the Harry Potter launches, crazily memorable though those were. This one took place in a large, old, wood-panelled room in the middle of Edinburgh, and the evening was so warm the windows were open, so we could hear the distant strains of bagpipes from the Royal Mile.

I’d arrived straight off a plane from London, and when I got into the room I thought “damn, of course,” because most of the women there were wearing the suffragette colours: green, purple and white, and I was head to toe in black jumper and trousers, like a mime, which was ironic given what we were there to celebrate.

This was a belated, post-publication party for The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, the book of essays to which I contributed, and which came out last month. “Wheesht” is a Scots injunction to be quiet: “haud your wheesht” means “hush!”

Protesters attend a Let Women Speak demonstration in Edinburgh in April

The book has contributions from 30 or so problematic Scottish females who didn’t agree with the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s vision of a country where a man could become a woman simply by declaring himself one.

Among the writers were politicians, journalists, activists and policy analysts. However, many contributors have no public profile. Some had written their essays anonymously.

I can’t use the word “ordinary” for the latter women, because they’re about as far from “ordinary” as you can get. These are the women who risked (and in some cases, lost) their livelihoods by standing up against an ideology embraced by Scottish politicians, state institutions and by the police.

These supposedly ordinary women fought because they could see no alternative but to fight: for other vulnerable women and girls, for single-sex spaces, for the right to speak about our own bodies as we please, and to retain the ability to call a man as a man, without which no analysis or activism around sex-based issues and inequalities is possible.

• JK Rowling: Labour has turned its back on women

There were speeches, a lot of cake and laughter, hugs for those who’d never met in person, and a feeling of delight and celebration that the book had been such an unexpected success (it caught the publisher off guard, as he admitted at the party; there have been several reprints already).

The women there were so funny, so brave, so determined; I don’t think I’ve ever felt as much solidarity in a room, a solidarity that stretched across party divides. I still felt elated and inspired when I got home.

On entering my sitting room, I found my husband watching the leaders’ debate on TV and I reached the sofa just in time to hear from another woman who didn’t fancy hauding her wheesht.

“Three years ago,” the woman in the studio audience said to Keir Starmer, “you criticised your MP Rosie Duffield for saying ‘only women have a cervix’. You recently backtracked on this. What do you believe now, and how do we know that you will stick to your views?” Ah, Cervixgate. I remember it well. It was September 2021 and I was sitting at my kitchen table reading over the chapter I’d finished the day before. The TV was on in the background, my husband was making toast, and I thought I must have misheard what the Labour leader had just said, so I reached for the remote. I rewound the programme and replayed his answer, then rewound and replayed it again.

In 2021 Rosie Duffield was criticised by Keir Starmer for saying “only women have a cervix”. He recently backtracked

I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, you see. I’ve been a Labour voter, a member (no longer), donor (not recently) and campaigner (ditto) all my adult life. I want to see an end to this long stretch of chaotic and often calamitous Tory rule. I want to want to vote Labour. But I hadn’t heard Starmer wrongly. When asked whether he agreed with Rosie Duffield that “only women have a cervix”, he’d responded, “well, it is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.”

If you’d catapulted me forwards in time from 1997, the year Labour last succeeded in ending a long stretch of Tory rule, and told me their male leader would appear live on television, dictating what women were allowed to say about their own reproductive systems, I’d have had no frame of reference by which to understand what would have seemed an utterance of outright lunacy.

Unfortunately, by 2021, Starmer’s answer had to be seen in the context of a Labour Party that not merely saw the rights of women as disposable, but struggled to say what a woman was at all.

Take Anneliese Dodds, the shadow secretary for women and equalities, who, when asked what a woman is, said, it “depends on what the context is”. Take Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary: “I’m not going to get into rabbit holes on this”; Stella Creasy, Labour candidate for Walthamstow: “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes … But they are now women and I respect that”; Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney-general: “Women who are trans deserve to be recognised, and yes — therefore some of them will have penises. Frankly, I’m not looking up their skirts, I don’t care.” Dawn Butler, the former MP for Brent Central, actually announced on TV that “a child is born without sex at the beginning” (I choose to believe she meant the lesser of two insanities here: a sex, not that children really are delivered by stork.)

Stella Creasy said: “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes … But they are now women and I respect that”

Some of this is almost funny, but loses its humour when real-world consequences of gender ideology arise. When asked whether violent sex offenders who transition should be rehoused in women’s prisons, Lisa Nandy, the shadow secretary for international development, said: “I think trans women are women, I think trans men are men, so I think they should be in the prison of their choosing.”

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the candidate for Salford, said female victims of male violence shouldn’t use their trauma “as an argument to discriminate against trans people” and vowed to change laws to stop women’s refuges excluding men who identify as women.

David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, called women like me “dinosaurs hoarding rights”. Lammy, too, has form on the vexed question of cervixes: “A cervix, I understand, is something you can have following various procedures and hormone treatments.” It’s very hard not to suspect that some of these men don’t know what a cervix is, but consider it too unimportant to Google.

So, there I was, on the edge of my sofa seat on Thursday night, waiting to hear Starmer clarify his views on an issue that places many left-leaning women on the spectrum between anger and disgust at his party’s embrace of gender identity ideology. Did he still maintain that women and cervixes ought not to be mentioned together?

Starmer said his position had changed “on the biology”

“On the biology,” Starmer began, “I agree with what Tony Blair said the other day, in relation to men having penises and women having vaginas.”

“So you’ve changed your position?” asked the moderator. “On the biology,” emphasised Starmer, leaving the impression that until Tony Blair sat him down for a chat, he’d never understood how he and his wife had come to produce children.

“That doesn’t help on the gender… some people don’t identify with the gender they’re born into …”

And off we meandered into the familiar trans activist talking points where so many Labour frontbenchers appear to feel most comfortable: “… my view in life is to give respect and dignity to everyone, whatever their position. And I was worried at the time, you referenced that particular debate [when Rosie Duffield stated biological facts], by the way in which the debate was being conducted, because it got very toxic, very divided, very hard line …”

In the interests of full transparency, I should say that Rosie Duffield’s a friend of mine. We’d probably have been friends no matter where or how we’d met, but we found each other as part of a group of women fighting to retain women’s rights.

She and I share more than the occasional meal and a fairly sweary WhatsApp thread. Last month, a man received a suspended prison sentence for sending both of us death threats. Rosie was to be taken out with a gun; I was to be beaten to death with a hammer. The level of threats Rosie has received is such that she’s had to hire personal security and was recently advised not to conduct in-person hustings.

Is this what Starmer meant, when he talked about toxic, divided debate? A female MP in his own party being intimidated and harassed? Or was he referencing the activists in black masks who turn up at women’s demonstrations with the declared intention of punching “Terfs”, an intention that has more than once translated into action? Was he perhaps thinking of the trans activists who sang “f*** you” over a microphone as women from all over the world queued outside FiLia, the feminist conference, to discuss issues like female genital mutilation? It didn’t seem so.

The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Blair.

It seems Rosie has received literally no support from Starmer over the threats and abuse, some of which has originated from within the Labour Party itself, and has had a severe, measurable impact on her life.

But she fights on, like all the women at the book launch, because she feels she has no choice. Like me, she believes the stakes are too high to walk away.

For left-leaning women like us, this isn’t, and never has been, about trans people enjoying the rights of every other citizen, and being free to present and identify however they wish.

This is about the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries. It’s about freedom of speech and observable truth. It’s about waiting, with dwindling hope, for the left to wake up to the fact that its lazy embrace of a quasi-religious ideology is having calamitous consequences.

Two hours before I watched Starmer fail, yet again, to get off the fence he’s so reluctant to stop straddling, I met the woman who wrote what I think all contributors would agree is the most important chapter in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht. It’s called A Hashtag is Born. The writer coined the phrase “women won’t wheesht”, which has now been taken up as a feminist battle cry in Scotland and beyond.

She wrote anonymously about being smeared as a bigot and a transphobe for wanting female-only intimate care for her beautiful learning-disabled daughter (I know her daughter’s beautiful, because I met her, too). In part, this mother wrote: “The material reality of a man is not changed by how he perceives himself, and telling vulnerable women and girls to ignore their own discomfort to accommodate a man’s perception of himself, is gaslighting.”

I cannot vote for any politician who takes issue with that mother’s words.

If you choose to prevaricate and patronise rather than address her concerns, if you continue to insist that the most vulnerable must embrace your luxury beliefs, no matter the cost to themselves, I don’t trust your judgment and I have a poor opinion of your character.

An independent candidate is standing in my constituency who’s campaigning to clarify the Equality Act.

Perhaps that’s where my X will have to go on July 4. As long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights their foremothers thought were won for all time, I’ll struggle to support them. The women who wouldn’t wheesht didn’t leave Labour. Labour abandoned them.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar ... -rrgbcrkd6

[tamada]

The last debate between Sunak and Starmer came across as someone trying to sell something tangible that has already cost a lot of money but doesn't work, versus someone trying to sell something vague that will still cost a lot of money and probably won't work either.

[Drunk Monkey]

Vote wisely... is a vote for REFORM .. Britain needs REFORM.

DM

[AlexO]

The last debate between Sunak and Starmer came across as someone trying to sell something tangible that has already cost a lot of money but doesn't work, versus someone trying to sell something vague that will still cost a lot of money and probably won't work either.

[tamada]

Vote wisely... is a vote for REFORM .. Britain needs REFORM.

DM

All that Farage is doing is highlighting what most voters already know: Conservative and Labour are two cheeks of the same arse. When it comes to Reform's key policies, especially illegal and legal migration, they push all the right buttons and ring the right bells, but they are light on how they would be implemented without the 100% cooperation of relevant parties, businesses, banks and other governments. All very fine and aspirational, but not a snowball's chance in hell of seeing the light of day.

British voters should vote for the local MP that says they will do mostly what they want or aligns with what they expect, regardless of the color of their rosette. Don't blindly vote for the party (or the other party). Unfortunately, the Tories have almost beaten the willingness of the voter to even go to the polls. For this to be a game-changing political moment for the UK, the turnout isn't expected to be anything affirmative for whoever forms the next government (or cobbles together another bloody coalition).

[tamada]

With two days to go, here's part IV.

[BillaRickaDickay]

With two days to go, here's part IV.

Well, I couldn't put it better myself.

Vote. "CONSERVATIVE"

I like Champagne.

[AlexO]

Sir Hindsight yesterday telling everyone that he has some very "difficult decisions" to make when/if he wins the election. Political speak for, see all those bull poo pre-election promises and everything in our manifesto, they were just fantasy speak. We will revert to type when in power, tax and spend like there is no tomorrow, encourage more centralised Government and so on it goes. No 'CHANGE' there then.

[tamada]

Good grief, Nigel won Clacton!

And Tice clinches it in Boston & Skegness.

4 seats (so far) for Reform.

DM's shout at CCW today.

[tamada]

Sir Hindsight yesterday telling everyone that he has some very "difficult decisions" to make when/if he wins the election. Political speak for, see all those bull poo pre-election promises and everything in our manifesto, they were just fantasy speak. We will revert to type when in power, tax and spend like there is no tomorrow, encourage more centralised Government and so on it goes. No 'CHANGE' there then.

Winning (as opposed to the Tory tailspin into the inferno).

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Nigel Farage gave a very good victory speech for a first-time victor. Beware Starmer, Reform will build on your coming mistakes. It is a sad day for Conservatives who are feeling blue today.

[AlexO]

Sir Hindsight yesterday telling everyone that he has some very "difficult decisions" to make when/if he wins the election. Political speak for, see all those bull poo pre-election promises and everything in our manifesto, they were just fantasy speak. We will revert to type when in power, tax and spend like there is no tomorrow, encourage more centralised Government and so on it goes. No 'CHANGE' there then.

Winning (as opposed to the Tory tailspin into the inferno).

Was always going to be the case. Slightly more worrying is the move further to the right by a large swathe of voters (Reform) confirms the trend thats happening all over Europe. Hopefully the rise of the Muslim representation in the Parliament will not become the devisive issue that takes over UK politics. The only other positive from the election, the SNP getting a well deserved skelping.

[tamada]

Sir Hindsight yesterday telling everyone that he has some very "difficult decisions" to make when/if he wins the election. Political speak for, see all those bull poo pre-election promises and everything in our manifesto, they were just fantasy speak. We will revert to type when in power, tax and spend like there is no tomorrow, encourage more centralised Government and so on it goes. No 'CHANGE' there then.

Winning (as opposed to the Tory tailspin into the inferno).

Was always going to be the case. Slightly more worrying is the move further to the right by a large swathe of voters (Reform) confirms the trend thats happening all over Europe. Hopefully the rise of the Muslim representation in the Parliament will not become the devisive issue that takes over UK politics. The only other positive from the election, the SNP getting a well deserved skelping.

I imagine the 'first-past-the-post' versus 'proportional representation' debate will have fresh fuel thrown on it. Reform would probably have gotten a dozen seats or more if the latter model was what UK elections use. Regardless, the SNP would still be screwed. Buh-bye to them.

Corbyn, running as an independent, won Islington North, where he's been a long-time Labour MP until the party spat the dummy. I heard an unfortunate sound bite on BBC radio where someone apparently declared that "Gaza is now in Parliament" but I missed the overall context.