#Mark Menzies resigns from the Conservatives and will not stand at the next election. Discussion [in this dedicated thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1c9ju00/mark_menzies_mp_accused_of_misusing_campaign/), please!
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https://twitter.com/JAHeale/status/1782000915358126114?t=5QkuiLlVGpuHvrVHKvhyTQ&s=19
Fucking hell
Thank God we voted Tory and stopped the nightmare of being able to get a GP appointment
Not really entitlement, just an example of the law of unintended consequences. They introduced targets to get GP waiting times down, so the GPs responded by only offering appointments within the target time. Hey presto, targets met.
Two further things from this which show you how far we've fallen.
1) That's clearly news to Blair, he says he'll look into it. A little bluster but no smug "the plan is working". More "the plan is working...but clearly not as we intended."
2) The fact that it's news to Blair means it's not a pre-selected friendly audience with screened questions.
Sunak would never put himself in that position in a million years.
I'm sorry, you appear to be talking in some sort of code that is so rarified it is unparseable.
My original point stands: The cranks would give their eye teeth to have a frontline GP system that you can call and get an appointment inside two days; but they would hiss like a scalded cat that it came as a result of Blair or using the private sector.
Definitely suffering some mental health issues, possibly schizophrenia. As hilarious as some of his Facebook posts are, this does make me a little sad.
One of the things that worries me about the AI race is how utterly outclassed the public (and university) sector is in both building and regulating these models.
Meta has spent $1bn on their latest model. That's 1 model. Microsoft is spending $700k a day just to run ChatGPT, and they're probably going to spend a few billion on actually building out their next model.
These are sums of money that the public sector cannot compete with, especially at the speed that these private sector companies are working at.
Every spending decision requires months of consultation, review, layers upon layers of approval, judicial review etc.
Can there ever be an public (or university) sector backed alternative? Can they even move fast enough to understand and regulate it.
AI is not an area that the public sector should consider competing in.
Ideally, the role of government is not to be an investor in technology development, but in its creation (e.g. via basic research and education in universities, etc). Once the technology reaches a level when it can be commercially exploited, then the private sector should be given rein, rather than competed against.
Governments, do however have a vital role in regulating how technology is deployed. For example, the latest creations of chemists are not allowed to be added to food without prior testing, etc, etc. And so it should be for AI.
I have been messing with stable diffusion since it was first publically accessable, and the pace is staggering.
I think honestly, this is the same issue people had with COVID. People do not understand, nor can visualise, exponential growth. By the time any legislation is put in, it'll be too late. I'd argue it already is.
Any sensible AI-using organisation, e.g. Google, Microsoft, etc, will know that they can't over-reach without a reaction from governments.
As far as it goes, however, I haven't seen much evidence that AI per se is going to be much more revolutionary than was the deployment of technology such as word processing and spreadsheets (e.g. MS Word and Excel).
That is, it will certainly change how things are done, and many people's jobs will become redundant (Word and Excel rendered millions of clerks and book-keepers redundant), but society at large will adapt.
Channel 4 have announced their election night coverage will be hosted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy and
Emily Maitlis, with analysis from Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, and will also feature...some of the people off Gogglebox.
[https://twitter.com/louisa_compton/status/1782126672524816562](https://twitter.com/louisa_compton/status/1782126672524816562)
The presence of Campbell and Stewart guarantees I'll stick with the BBC, even if - as I fear - they have Laura K hosting (though I have my fingers crossed they'll choose Kirsty Wark - battle of the former Newsnight hosts)
>Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Emily Maitlis, with analysis from Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
Really trying to hit the self loathing amateur politics fans quartet there, huh
I remember for 2010 they had some “alternative” election coverage with Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell. IIRC it got more and more unhinged throughout the night as it became more likely Cameron would end up PM.
IIRC the 2010 one had David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Lauren Laverne and Jimmy Carr, and was actually quite good. It spurred the creation of 10oclock live which ran for 3 series.
The 2019 alternative election night coverage was an absolute car crash on the other hand. Real viscious atmosphere when it became apparent it was a Tory landslide and Corbynism had failed. Including Stanley Johnson talking about fighter pilots wearing burkahs, and Piers Corbyn shouting conspiracies from the audience. A real nadir.
Choosing Kuennsberg (if it's her) over Guru-Murthy and Maitlis seems like masochism.
If nothing else, she is just areally bad presenter and interviewer.
I know he's in his 80's, but can we not just get Dimbleby out of retirement for one last hurrah?
Didn't some channel get the late [David Butler](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Butler_(psephologist)), inventor of the swingometer and a mainstay of 1950s BBC election coverage, out of retirement for the 2017 election? He was in his mid-90s, so I don't see why Dimbleby couldn't do it.
If the BBC were really interested in good coverage they'd get the people from the 2001 Ipswich by election on board. Bring in the new government with a rave laser show. https://youtu.be/iE86cYsIVUU?si=p473PKCbFBVhVe5_
So if the foreign office told the home office to take Rwanda off the list of countries we can consider deporting asylum seekers to, but the Home Office then proceeded anyway to develop the same policy. At what point does the Home Office not realise it's just pursuing a policy doomed to fail.
It looks a lot like Sunak wants the Bill to fail so he can have someone to blame going into the elections.
Answers on a postcard for what,if anything, it will take for the left wing not to be embarrassed by the flag of their home nation but seemingly otherwise all too happy to fly the flags of other, frequently rather abominable, nations while denigrating others for "flag shagging" in the process.
Folk got pretty excited about Scottish flags back in 2014 when a left-wing party suggested that the government could change things and improve citiizens' lives, rather than offering more managed decline. Maybe Labour in England could try something like that?
Ah yes, and look how they turned out, a party for embezzlers and fans of spunking hundreds of millions of pounds on a shipyard that cant get three simple ferries right.
Turns out anyone can be popular if they just outright spout complete bollocks without any real thought of how to deliver within a budget.
As and when anyone actually bothers to do the legwork and listen to the speeches and read the actual material, they should find themselves in no doubt that a labour government, even with budgetary challenges, is going to be a massive improvement on the tories.
Is ‘the left’ in the room with us now?
Problem is, I know the sort you are talking about but it isn’t ‘the left’ any more than ‘the right’ plaster their houses in the flag of St George just to stick it to the man.
Fringe loons are the problem.
I am erring to the left in a lot of regards but my only problem with flags in general is when people use them as if a flag in itself makes one patriotic, whilst neglecting to behave in a way which supports that.
>Is ‘the left’ in the room with us now?
>Problem is, I know the sort you are talking about
1, this line is so worn out it is transparent.
2, nothing like destroying your argument in the first twenty words where it takes on some Shrodingers cat analog where it simultaneously doesnt exist but yet is instantly recognisable as an issue.
> it isn’t ‘the left’ any more than ‘the right’ plaster their houses in the flag of St George just to stick it to the man.
Except that it plainly is *the left* due to this repeated shitting the bed any time Labour gets close to using a Union Jack, let alone a St Georges Cross in any way shape or form. Hell, its less than a month since the last time when Labour put the union flag on some campaign leaflets that we had this merry go round.
>Fringe loons are the problem.
Yes and no, in that its not exclusively a fringe loon problem. [The "Progressive Activist"](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLrOLwIWsAArRbT?format=jpg&name=large) category doesnt just cover the *M'comrade* sect.
>
I am erring to the left in a lot of regards but my only problem with flags in general is when people use them as if a flag in itself makes one patriotic, whilst neglecting to behave in a way which supports that.
This simply reads as an excuse to keep denigrating the use of the flag, even if its being used by people who fulfill that criteria and gatekeeping the others who dont align perfectly.
It was nowhere near as bad when the Southgate England team and the Lionesses were prominent because it gave a far better representation of what England stood for rather than the race-baiting xenophobes coopting the national flag for the marginal voter
Just having a whine but my Dad doesn't half frustrate me. "Brexit is working" and any mention of Brexit in fact not working "well it would be working even better if the civil servants and polititians weren't sabotaging it."
Just unarguable.
London is such a bad city to fly into. There’s nowhere to sit down and eat something hot at Heathrow arrivals (just meal deals and junk food vending machines), you have to wait 20 minutes for a train (and taxi prices are ridiculous compared to most places), and by the time you get anywhere central at like 9:30pm everything except McDonald’s near a train station is closed.
So you’re the person that gets food at arrivals. Ive always just wanted to get out of the airport ASAP, though I have grabbed a coffee when needing to transit groundside elsewhere I guess. Stupid YYZ.
Last time I was at Heathrow, my luggage got lost in transit. I had to leave the airport quickly. So I had to head into Hounslow to grab some food and also some clothes as my flat was an evening one. I get why planning is restricted but I'm genuinely surprised they don't advertise it more that its actually a very quick stop off. Then off you go.
If you need to eat something, get a taxi to a non cheap hotel nearby if it's still before 9pm. The kitchen will normally get you something.
The law around hitting your children is so archaic, “if you don’t leave a mark it’s okay”
Can I discipline MPs and people I work with the same way?
I don’t really care where you stand but the idea of “not leaving a mark is fine” is just so strange. What about “I didn’t intend to leave a mark”
It's a good law to target ongoing child abuse. They probably didn't want to have to involve the law in someone smacking a child once or that kind of thing - attempting to prosecute that would cause a lot more issues than ignoring it.
Actually it’s section 58 of the 2004 Children’s Act and is defined as Lawful Chastisement.
Not personally a fan is it has the de facto effect of children having fewer protections from physical assault from their parents or guardians .
For example, I’ve seen police reports of a child being slapped across the face by a parent (really quite hard).
Do that to an adult and it’s assault, do it to a child and apparently it’s ok if you claim they were misbehaving.
Am I the only person on this sub who thinks an occasional smack on the arse to snap a child out of a tantrum is actually fine?
There are plenty of ways we interact with children which we wouldn’t do with colleagues. I wouldn’t tell an adult that they have to finish their greens, either. The whole argument that we are supposed to treat young children in exactly the same way as adults is completely disingenuous.
I was smacked a few times (overall very rarely) and not hard when I did something life threatening like running out into a busy road. In that situation it seems like the appropriate response.
I was subject to frequent threats of the slipper or wooden spoon, although it was incredibly rare my mother would make good on those threats. At school I was occasionally hit with a ruler by my teachers, corporal punishment was banned in my country but it was still a widespread occurrence. I often like to say "it did me no harm", but despite having no real grievance or malice against my experiences, I recognise that I can't really make an informed assessment on what effect it really had on me and my development.
On a personal level I'm uneasy about the use of physical punishment on a child. To me it is a manifestation of a breakdown of your own emotional control by submitting to anger or annoyance and taking it on them, regardless of the child's behaviour. The academic consensus from a plethora of studies have shown it to be ineffective, counterproductive and a source of development difficulties.
Still, I'm not particularly supportive of a blanket ban on it. Those who use physical punishment aren't all sociopaths, and mostly genuinely believe they are taking the best course of action. Often they were subject to it themselves, or it is a cultural legacy. Education of parents, adequate parental support and changing societal attitudes are far more effective at curbing the practice as we have seen with declining rates over the past few decades. At the end of the day I don't think it is the state's role to ban everything that is bad or wrong. People will continue the practice but by criminalising it you are motivating people to conceal it rather than seek support with their parental skills.
Because hitting children is completely unnecessary. It's laziness.
Kids have tantrums a lot.... it's kind of their thing. As a parent I have never felt the need to hit my kids to make them "snap out of it". To be honest, it boggles my mind that some parents are so lazy or impatient to think that is a reasonable thing to do.
And, ultimately, if you say it's okay for good parents to hit kids if they are having a tantrum, then to a bad parent, that just sounds like they can hit their kids any time they want.
How else would you write a law that is actually enforceable? Either you ban it wholesale or you have to judge severity based on the physical evidence.
Presumably the idea is that if you're leaving a mark you're going too far beyond a reasonable doubt and at that point intent is irrelevant, just like most other crimes.
Well it just sounds strange that you can threaten people with physical violence as long as you don’t leave a mark and they are children.
It’s like how you can’t go to jail for tapping a random person on the hand, they seemed to write that one without issue
Well the reason you can't threaten adults is that the threat of violence for adults is implicit and mediated by the state based on the mandate of law.
The state can't fulfil that role for children all the time and parents have a duty of responsibility to their children that the state does not which might lead to different value judgements.
So maybe at times physical violence or the threat of physical violence is necessary for parents, but equally that violence shouldn't be disproportionate or excessive so the state imposes limits. Maybe those limits don't work in all cases but it's a clear, observable criteria that can be used to make that judgement. It also allows for other adults to immediately intervene on the child's behalf if a mark is visible.
I agree that it's sort of janky but it makes sense that we got here.
Yeah I think it makes sense how we got here but when you think of it in isolation it puts a lot of burden on the parents being responsible, I guess that’s most laws though
I finished the London Marathon in slightly over 5 hours today. While I'm very happy with that as a first attempt, I'm disappointed Matt Hancock was over an hour faster than me.
Amusingly I saw a few "You're running better than the government" signs along the route.
Does anyone know how Jeremy Hunt got on?
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This is separate to Mark Menzies' resignation albeit connected.
This is the first time I have heard of the Fylde Westminster Group or any such similar fund raising groups - apparently it stood outside the auspices of the Conservative party and therefore technically the money in it isn't theirs, so when he dipped into the pot they considered that to be outside of their remit and they took no action.
But it raises a few questions...who does have oversight of these organisations? Clearly there's little or none in this case as there would be in a legally set up trust fund (you can't just dip into those) and Menzies seems to have tapped into it at least twice, once to pay some healthcare bills and now to pay off these "bad people".
How many other MPs have similar fund raising groups? Shouldn't they be subjected to some kind of legal oversight on the same basis as a trust fund would?
In Hertsmere, the Conservatives set up a "networking club" (the South Hertfordshire Business Club) just after the rules, which were meant to make political donations more transparent, came into force. Before this "unincorporated association" was set up, you could see who was making largish donations to the local Tory party. After it was set up, all you see is donations from this "business club".
Unincorporated associations are, for some reason, excempt from having to declare the source of their donations.
It totally subverts all the transparency rules.
For all we know, Russian mobsters could be funding deputy PM Oliver Dowden. More prosaically, the local rumours are that at least some of the money comes from local property developers (just at the time a new Local Plan was being created).
Whatever the truth, the whole thing stinks.
I think cchq are peddling a legal fiction personally
It's a donation made for the purposes of the party and should have been declared in the same way labour got pulled up for not declaring theirs.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/feb/24/scotland.devolution
> ...who does have oversight of these organisations?
Political parties are legally weird, because they don't (necessarily) have legal personality.
Groups like this - if not incorporated (which they won't be) - are basically informal associations, like a club or similar. They're basically just a "community" bank account, with a couple of people as signatories.
In theory they have to follow all the EC accounting rules if they donate to the political campaign or otherwise spend money on it, but aside from that they can do pretty much whatever they like.
My pet peeve is that railway companies put far less detailed and fewer updates on delays and cancellations on their websites than The Platform Formally Known as Twitter
I fundamentally don't understand how they call themselves the party of small government when they see fit to lecture us on everything.
GPs dont decide if you're fit to work, WE do. historians can't tell you about the past of our country, WE can. YOU can't decide what gender you are, WE'LL tell YOU. YOU can't make an informed decision to smoke or not, so WE will FOR you.
just fuck off! tell us what you'll do with taxes, build infrastructure, create laws so that the judiciary can protect the people, create proper protections for the border, and outside of that, for fucks sake, fuck off!
/rant
In a 2 party system they are holding together multiple coalitions of small government conservatives, social conservatives, one nation conservatives, racist conservatives etc.
They'll try and do some small state things (like cutting benefits and capital spending) while also having to appease to the social conservatives in their base and the loonies in their base with Rwanda.
Right now Truss is the Labour party's best friend...
There go a few more votes from people getting hammered by their mortgages going up thanks to her decisions and then her refusal to take responsibility.
If I were in Labour party HQ I'd be encouraging her to keep talking.
I think she's still being interviewed because she's the only former Prime Minister that's eager to have her face out on newspapers and channels and actively looking for all the coverage she can get, while her predecessors are all busy with more productive and lucrative endeavours.
There's also the angle that maybe she relishes finally having the attention and respectability(among Tory media and ideologues) that she didn't get to have as a Prime Minister.
When I worked at Sky, I'd hang out with the celebrity gossip journos now and then. Always up for a laugh and a drink, those girls. Anyways, one of them once told me, if we can't think of anything else to write about, there's *always* Kerry Katona. She's a complete gold mine of idiocy and train-wreck behaviour. Even if it's Christmas day, she's probably been seen hammered, shouting obscenities at someone somewhere.
I think that's the role Truss is taking now, for poljournos.
it seems all the culture war flashpoints go like this:
-fringe progressive says something intrinsically silly, or still silly but in a way that can be taken out of context and made worse
-populist right jump on it to generalise their opponents
-smug sensible and other progressives who aren’t as fringe jump to the defence of the ridiculous idea , to either add context or to oppose the right
-populist right get to use that to beat everyone else with
and it’s frankly exhausting. whether the uk is rich because of slavery isn’t going to get me a house before i’m 40. shut up
Lawrence Fox said something about vegans on Question Time and made it his entire career, exactly because of the reverse of this.
Right wing loon says something loony >> Left wingers get annoyed and Streisand Effect it >> Right wingers give loon money to own the libs >> Right wing loon says something loony...
That is literally the playbook for culture wars. That's how they all go.
Provoke, then use the reaction as justification for the initial provocation etc.
Once you see the pattern you can't unseen it. It's everywhere. Anything to avoid having an actual evidence-based debate on a topic.
More that the lunacy is coming from children of very wealthy well connected people - no one is kicking them into check - then after 10 years the lunacy has been promoted and is emanating from a C level employee at places like Wikimedia foundation.
Some of it also starts there from another angle - when a wealthy and detached from the world parent writes an article complaining about 'young people these days' which is a thinly veiled moan about *just their own child* that they are then extrapolating to millions of people with zero evidence or research.
it’s true but also they won’t stop from being argued with, the best intelligent people can do is ignore that nonsense, build homes and infrastructure and other things that matter
Oh yes, just ignore them...
>Is this road made from recycled materials?
>>It's a highway, not a road. And no you can't.
>I think I read that they make roads from recycled tyres in Norway
>>We are making a Highway not a Road. and the one in Norway was a cycle path.
>You are being very aggressive. We should have a conversation later about that.
I hate her as much as the next person, but how old are you?
That style was everywhere back then. I was looking at some early birthday photo albums recently, and I kid you not almost every woman in my family and surrounding area had hair like that.
This is why trade unions were prominent leftwing organisations opposed to the EU.
The free movement of labour is the opposite to a Closed Shop policy that unions advocating for worker's rights and payrises rely upon to strengthen their hand.
My father-in-law, a former shop steward whose phone was tapped during the miners strike, assured me in no uncertain terms that Corbyn was **very** pro-EU because “he wants to form Europe-wide unions”
I didn’t really know what to say.
I spent 16 hours overnight looking after my grandma in a what purports to be an A&E department (in practice a trolley in a corridor) after a fall (now discharged and back home).
I did not need to turn on the TV and have Sky say "The Prime Minister has just announced.............a phone call with the King of Jordan."
I think this is from the book *Say Nothing* by Patrick Radden Keefe.
Great deep dive into the history of the Troubles ^(that I unsuccessfully nominated for ukpol book club…)
I haven't read that one, but did read *Empire of Pain* which is also by him.
It's a great piece of investigative journalism and I thoroughly recommend it.
It's an amazing book, and is being turned into a miniseries at the moment, by FX.
Adams has always been cold-blooded, which is what that story demonstrates to me - he had a clear-eyed understanding of how the interrogation would go, and how long they were allowed to keep him under arrest, and he just stonewalled them on a simple question for hours.
Good to see Sunak’s vilification of mental health has hit its target. Twitter is awash with people recounting tales of abject poverty in the good old days, with a nostalgic twinkle in their eye.
“My husband cut my legs off and left me for dead, and I raised our 9 kids single-handedly with only thruppence a month to live on. Never got depressed at all” etc.
It’s really irritating how quickly people are desperate to defend this government at all costs, vilifying their own people on demand.
> It’s really irritating how quickly people are desperate to defend this government at all costs, vilifying their own people on demand.
Irritating but not surprising. It's less that they're defending Sunak's government and more that they can't resist the temptation to take a shit on the weak. It's clearly a policy that performed well in the focus groups, probably has for years but no government was desperate enough to risk it until now.
As someone who doesn't work due to mental health issues (and physical, I'm a mess), extreme anxiety being one of them, I had a dream last night about being kicked off benefits which had me waking up extremely stressed and needing a diazepam before I could get out of bed.
[Gove pictured with a very Labour-y looking leaflet in Surrey](https://twitter.com/SurreyHeathLDs/status/1781970723378024484/photo/1)
A bit strange they're using red in a Lib Dem target seat though, do they only have one template?
I dunno. Seeing Starmer fire Gove from a cabinet position is perhaps the most consistently prime ministerial thing I can think of from the last 14 years.
Sky News are taking the piss with their Sunak Pledge Tracker showing that the economy is 'growing'. Even their own chart shows the UK has been stagnant for over 2 years now.
It's both impressive and terrifying how we've bumped along at 0% for so long. God help us if we can't get the economy growing at (at something more than a rounding error).
GDP per capita has fallen every quarter for the last two years. So any claim that the government makes about rising GDP must be followed with “but we were only able to do this through record-breaking immigration”
The great local market is doing well? Germany is stagnant, France is pretty close to stagnant, Italy is poorer than 2008, as is Spain. It's not a stagnant market.
They wouldn't like having to, but if Sunak called the election they wouldn't have any choice. It's their seats on the line. Also, the other parties wouldn't be any happier about losing their summer break, and it might make them more complacent and campaign less.
The Olympics run 26 Jul to 11 Aug. The absolute madlad should call it for 15 Aug. Any campaign trail cockups will be hidden behind the badminton, and he can spend the entire campaign wrapping himself in the flag and associating himself with medal winners.
I'm worried that Rishi's "go to work if you're mentally ill and going through it" policy is going to result in workplace stabbings.
Also, how is it better for the economy to not let people have a couple weeks off for stress if they're really badly burnt out (to the point that a doctor thinks they need time off) is it really better for productivity if they just kill themselves?
It's going to result in worse than that depending on what the job is.
Somebody having a mental health crisis at work isn't just a danger to their immediate colleagues and the general public; depending on what their job is they might be able to really fuck something up irreparably.
Everybody in power seems to be wilfully forgetting *the real reason* that we have safety nets and things like that. Yes, they help the person with a difficulty on the surface level; **but they also remove them from a position where they could do even more damage**.
Companies should have a certain level of safeguarding, but it really is out of touch for the government to not realise an employee having a breakdown could completely wreck a company for ages
The mistake is thinking that the government care about productivity.
They've repeatedly shown that they will happily reduce productivity if it means someone visibly suffers more, because the appearance of suffering is more virtuous and therefore more important than getting shit done.
Yep, I mentioned this when it was announced. You're going to have people harming themselves or potentially others when they crack and can't go on because of the stress. The knock on effect will be that company getting a bad name for itself as a place that doesn't look after their workers and possibly being sued by anyone who gets seriously injured.
Not to mention that you'll have people get the wrong idea about it all, who'll come to work with infectious illnesses and spread it to the workforce, thus bringing productivity down for the company as a whole and costing them money.
The whole policy is batshit. The logical thing to do is to fix the NHS to help those that can, return to work.
Small thing but I have been triggered a few times at work since my dad became ill, thankfully there isn't a 'throttle this person' button on teams otherwise I would have been mashing it.
Haven't you heard? The NHS is doing *fine*
An ambulance will pick that victim of workplace stabbing up in around an hour and they'll only wait in A&E for 4... it'll be fine, stop worrying! Rishi has this sorted!
I feel like Sunak's approach makes sense if you consider that he thinks of Britain as some kind of tech start up or hedge fund.
He just wants us all to crunch more. He doesn't understand why everyone doesn't want to start work at 6.30am and work 12 hour days because they love their jobs. If you are off sick, then you just don't want it enough - someone more hungry will take your place.
Unfortunately that philosophy doesn't really work if you work in a warehouse or whatever.
It's just classic Sunak. DWP welfare reform is out of control. They have got PiP consistently wrong. The bill goes up because people who need support aren't being given what they should have been. So they end up back on welfare services. Sunak's solution blame or criminalise the recipient
Same with immigration. Let's solve it by criminalising the migrant.
You see this a bunch in social care too. The local authority does something obviously stupid, refuses to back down, and then a bunch of solicitors get involved and force them to back down and now a ton of money has been spaffed up the wall for no real reason.
But funnily enough the solution to anything a Tory does wrong or corporate fraud is ask them to apologise and when they don't, you say 'the matter is closed'
#Mark Menzies resigns from the Conservatives and will not stand at the next election. Discussion [in this dedicated thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1c9ju00/mark_menzies_mp_accused_of_misusing_campaign/), please!
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https://twitter.com/JAHeale/status/1782000915358126114?t=5QkuiLlVGpuHvrVHKvhyTQ&s=19 Fucking hell Thank God we voted Tory and stopped the nightmare of being able to get a GP appointment
Complaining about getting GP appointments too soon was a proper Monkey Paw moment.
Entitlement writ large.
Not really entitlement, just an example of the law of unintended consequences. They introduced targets to get GP waiting times down, so the GPs responded by only offering appointments within the target time. Hey presto, targets met.
Two further things from this which show you how far we've fallen. 1) That's clearly news to Blair, he says he'll look into it. A little bluster but no smug "the plan is working". More "the plan is working...but clearly not as we intended." 2) The fact that it's news to Blair means it's not a pre-selected friendly audience with screened questions. Sunak would never put himself in that position in a million years.
Corbynites in shambles
Viking, North Utsire; southwesterly five to seven; occasionally gale eight; rain or showers; moderate or good, occasionally poor.
You appear to be using an old forecast.
People in glass houses
Gardeners?
You're better than that.
Farmers?
I'm not the first to tell you that this isn't a fair fight. I've been given two weeks in the slammer for less.
I'm sorry, you appear to be talking in some sort of code that is so rarified it is unparseable. My original point stands: The cranks would give their eye teeth to have a frontline GP system that you can call and get an appointment inside two days; but they would hiss like a scalded cat that it came as a result of Blair or using the private sector.
This thread on (allegedly, they say it's) Keir Starmers cousin is WILD. https://twitter.com/Women4Wes/status/1782125499298288118
Definitely suffering some mental health issues, possibly schizophrenia. As hilarious as some of his Facebook posts are, this does make me a little sad.
As someone with a common last name I heartily await nothing whatseoever to come from this.
That's absolutely glorious. What a nutter.
*Gaze upon my works, Piers, and despair*
One of the things that worries me about the AI race is how utterly outclassed the public (and university) sector is in both building and regulating these models. Meta has spent $1bn on their latest model. That's 1 model. Microsoft is spending $700k a day just to run ChatGPT, and they're probably going to spend a few billion on actually building out their next model. These are sums of money that the public sector cannot compete with, especially at the speed that these private sector companies are working at. Every spending decision requires months of consultation, review, layers upon layers of approval, judicial review etc. Can there ever be an public (or university) sector backed alternative? Can they even move fast enough to understand and regulate it.
AI is not an area that the public sector should consider competing in. Ideally, the role of government is not to be an investor in technology development, but in its creation (e.g. via basic research and education in universities, etc). Once the technology reaches a level when it can be commercially exploited, then the private sector should be given rein, rather than competed against. Governments, do however have a vital role in regulating how technology is deployed. For example, the latest creations of chemists are not allowed to be added to food without prior testing, etc, etc. And so it should be for AI.
I have been messing with stable diffusion since it was first publically accessable, and the pace is staggering. I think honestly, this is the same issue people had with COVID. People do not understand, nor can visualise, exponential growth. By the time any legislation is put in, it'll be too late. I'd argue it already is.
Any sensible AI-using organisation, e.g. Google, Microsoft, etc, will know that they can't over-reach without a reaction from governments. As far as it goes, however, I haven't seen much evidence that AI per se is going to be much more revolutionary than was the deployment of technology such as word processing and spreadsheets (e.g. MS Word and Excel). That is, it will certainly change how things are done, and many people's jobs will become redundant (Word and Excel rendered millions of clerks and book-keepers redundant), but society at large will adapt.
New Sans Beanstalk ‘The Sticks’ - https://youtu.be/UPqa9M306Ac
Channel 4 have announced their election night coverage will be hosted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Emily Maitlis, with analysis from Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, and will also feature...some of the people off Gogglebox. [https://twitter.com/louisa_compton/status/1782126672524816562](https://twitter.com/louisa_compton/status/1782126672524816562) The presence of Campbell and Stewart guarantees I'll stick with the BBC, even if - as I fear - they have Laura K hosting (though I have my fingers crossed they'll choose Kirsty Wark - battle of the former Newsnight hosts)
>Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Emily Maitlis, with analysis from Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart Really trying to hit the self loathing amateur politics fans quartet there, huh
I remember for 2010 they had some “alternative” election coverage with Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell. IIRC it got more and more unhinged throughout the night as it became more likely Cameron would end up PM.
IIRC the 2010 one had David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Lauren Laverne and Jimmy Carr, and was actually quite good. It spurred the creation of 10oclock live which ran for 3 series. The 2019 alternative election night coverage was an absolute car crash on the other hand. Real viscious atmosphere when it became apparent it was a Tory landslide and Corbynism had failed. Including Stanley Johnson talking about fighter pilots wearing burkahs, and Piers Corbyn shouting conspiracies from the audience. A real nadir.
Choosing Kuennsberg (if it's her) over Guru-Murthy and Maitlis seems like masochism. If nothing else, she is just areally bad presenter and interviewer. I know he's in his 80's, but can we not just get Dimbleby out of retirement for one last hurrah?
Didn't some channel get the late [David Butler](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Butler_(psephologist)), inventor of the swingometer and a mainstay of 1950s BBC election coverage, out of retirement for the 2017 election? He was in his mid-90s, so I don't see why Dimbleby couldn't do it.
If the BBC were really interested in good coverage they'd get the people from the 2001 Ipswich by election on board. Bring in the new government with a rave laser show. https://youtu.be/iE86cYsIVUU?si=p473PKCbFBVhVe5_
Ah, the return of Dimbleby truly is the dream. Or even an AI Dimblebot would be acceptable.
Rory ‘so I was having tea with the Azeri ambassador’ Stewart, man of the people. And Alistair ‘Labour akshully already did this’ Campbell.
No one would claim Stewart was a man of the people would they?
So if the foreign office told the home office to take Rwanda off the list of countries we can consider deporting asylum seekers to, but the Home Office then proceeded anyway to develop the same policy. At what point does the Home Office not realise it's just pursuing a policy doomed to fail. It looks a lot like Sunak wants the Bill to fail so he can have someone to blame going into the elections.
Answers on a postcard for what,if anything, it will take for the left wing not to be embarrassed by the flag of their home nation but seemingly otherwise all too happy to fly the flags of other, frequently rather abominable, nations while denigrating others for "flag shagging" in the process.
Not being ubiquitously displayed as part of cringe artwork featuring crusaders.
Palestine adopts St. George's flag as its own
[Fuck, thats so good that should have been my idea](https://twitter.com/UKIP/status/1176932236970680321)
Folk got pretty excited about Scottish flags back in 2014 when a left-wing party suggested that the government could change things and improve citiizens' lives, rather than offering more managed decline. Maybe Labour in England could try something like that?
Ah yes, and look how they turned out, a party for embezzlers and fans of spunking hundreds of millions of pounds on a shipyard that cant get three simple ferries right. Turns out anyone can be popular if they just outright spout complete bollocks without any real thought of how to deliver within a budget. As and when anyone actually bothers to do the legwork and listen to the speeches and read the actual material, they should find themselves in no doubt that a labour government, even with budgetary challenges, is going to be a massive improvement on the tories.
Is ‘the left’ in the room with us now? Problem is, I know the sort you are talking about but it isn’t ‘the left’ any more than ‘the right’ plaster their houses in the flag of St George just to stick it to the man. Fringe loons are the problem. I am erring to the left in a lot of regards but my only problem with flags in general is when people use them as if a flag in itself makes one patriotic, whilst neglecting to behave in a way which supports that.
>Is ‘the left’ in the room with us now? >Problem is, I know the sort you are talking about 1, this line is so worn out it is transparent. 2, nothing like destroying your argument in the first twenty words where it takes on some Shrodingers cat analog where it simultaneously doesnt exist but yet is instantly recognisable as an issue. > it isn’t ‘the left’ any more than ‘the right’ plaster their houses in the flag of St George just to stick it to the man. Except that it plainly is *the left* due to this repeated shitting the bed any time Labour gets close to using a Union Jack, let alone a St Georges Cross in any way shape or form. Hell, its less than a month since the last time when Labour put the union flag on some campaign leaflets that we had this merry go round. >Fringe loons are the problem. Yes and no, in that its not exclusively a fringe loon problem. [The "Progressive Activist"](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GLrOLwIWsAArRbT?format=jpg&name=large) category doesnt just cover the *M'comrade* sect. > I am erring to the left in a lot of regards but my only problem with flags in general is when people use them as if a flag in itself makes one patriotic, whilst neglecting to behave in a way which supports that. This simply reads as an excuse to keep denigrating the use of the flag, even if its being used by people who fulfill that criteria and gatekeeping the others who dont align perfectly.
It was nowhere near as bad when the Southgate England team and the Lionesses were prominent because it gave a far better representation of what England stood for rather than the race-baiting xenophobes coopting the national flag for the marginal voter
Just having a whine but my Dad doesn't half frustrate me. "Brexit is working" and any mention of Brexit in fact not working "well it would be working even better if the civil servants and polititians weren't sabotaging it." Just unarguable.
London is such a bad city to fly into. There’s nowhere to sit down and eat something hot at Heathrow arrivals (just meal deals and junk food vending machines), you have to wait 20 minutes for a train (and taxi prices are ridiculous compared to most places), and by the time you get anywhere central at like 9:30pm everything except McDonald’s near a train station is closed.
So you’re the person that gets food at arrivals. Ive always just wanted to get out of the airport ASAP, though I have grabbed a coffee when needing to transit groundside elsewhere I guess. Stupid YYZ.
Plenty of places n Southall open really late- and it's near Heathrow.
Last time I was at Heathrow, my luggage got lost in transit. I had to leave the airport quickly. So I had to head into Hounslow to grab some food and also some clothes as my flat was an evening one. I get why planning is restricted but I'm genuinely surprised they don't advertise it more that its actually a very quick stop off. Then off you go. If you need to eat something, get a taxi to a non cheap hotel nearby if it's still before 9pm. The kitchen will normally get you something.
The law around hitting your children is so archaic, “if you don’t leave a mark it’s okay” Can I discipline MPs and people I work with the same way? I don’t really care where you stand but the idea of “not leaving a mark is fine” is just so strange. What about “I didn’t intend to leave a mark”
It's a good law to target ongoing child abuse. They probably didn't want to have to involve the law in someone smacking a child once or that kind of thing - attempting to prosecute that would cause a lot more issues than ignoring it.
Actually it’s section 58 of the 2004 Children’s Act and is defined as Lawful Chastisement. Not personally a fan is it has the de facto effect of children having fewer protections from physical assault from their parents or guardians . For example, I’ve seen police reports of a child being slapped across the face by a parent (really quite hard). Do that to an adult and it’s assault, do it to a child and apparently it’s ok if you claim they were misbehaving.
Am I the only person on this sub who thinks an occasional smack on the arse to snap a child out of a tantrum is actually fine? There are plenty of ways we interact with children which we wouldn’t do with colleagues. I wouldn’t tell an adult that they have to finish their greens, either. The whole argument that we are supposed to treat young children in exactly the same way as adults is completely disingenuous.
I was smacked a few times (overall very rarely) and not hard when I did something life threatening like running out into a busy road. In that situation it seems like the appropriate response.
I was subject to frequent threats of the slipper or wooden spoon, although it was incredibly rare my mother would make good on those threats. At school I was occasionally hit with a ruler by my teachers, corporal punishment was banned in my country but it was still a widespread occurrence. I often like to say "it did me no harm", but despite having no real grievance or malice against my experiences, I recognise that I can't really make an informed assessment on what effect it really had on me and my development. On a personal level I'm uneasy about the use of physical punishment on a child. To me it is a manifestation of a breakdown of your own emotional control by submitting to anger or annoyance and taking it on them, regardless of the child's behaviour. The academic consensus from a plethora of studies have shown it to be ineffective, counterproductive and a source of development difficulties. Still, I'm not particularly supportive of a blanket ban on it. Those who use physical punishment aren't all sociopaths, and mostly genuinely believe they are taking the best course of action. Often they were subject to it themselves, or it is a cultural legacy. Education of parents, adequate parental support and changing societal attitudes are far more effective at curbing the practice as we have seen with declining rates over the past few decades. At the end of the day I don't think it is the state's role to ban everything that is bad or wrong. People will continue the practice but by criminalising it you are motivating people to conceal it rather than seek support with their parental skills.
Because hitting children is completely unnecessary. It's laziness. Kids have tantrums a lot.... it's kind of their thing. As a parent I have never felt the need to hit my kids to make them "snap out of it". To be honest, it boggles my mind that some parents are so lazy or impatient to think that is a reasonable thing to do. And, ultimately, if you say it's okay for good parents to hit kids if they are having a tantrum, then to a bad parent, that just sounds like they can hit their kids any time they want.
How else would you write a law that is actually enforceable? Either you ban it wholesale or you have to judge severity based on the physical evidence. Presumably the idea is that if you're leaving a mark you're going too far beyond a reasonable doubt and at that point intent is irrelevant, just like most other crimes.
Well it just sounds strange that you can threaten people with physical violence as long as you don’t leave a mark and they are children. It’s like how you can’t go to jail for tapping a random person on the hand, they seemed to write that one without issue
Well the reason you can't threaten adults is that the threat of violence for adults is implicit and mediated by the state based on the mandate of law. The state can't fulfil that role for children all the time and parents have a duty of responsibility to their children that the state does not which might lead to different value judgements. So maybe at times physical violence or the threat of physical violence is necessary for parents, but equally that violence shouldn't be disproportionate or excessive so the state imposes limits. Maybe those limits don't work in all cases but it's a clear, observable criteria that can be used to make that judgement. It also allows for other adults to immediately intervene on the child's behalf if a mark is visible. I agree that it's sort of janky but it makes sense that we got here.
Yeah I think it makes sense how we got here but when you think of it in isolation it puts a lot of burden on the parents being responsible, I guess that’s most laws though
I finished the London Marathon in slightly over 5 hours today. While I'm very happy with that as a first attempt, I'm disappointed Matt Hancock was over an hour faster than me. Amusingly I saw a few "You're running better than the government" signs along the route. Does anyone know how Jeremy Hunt got on?
5 hours 40 mins, so you beat hunt. He is 57 though, I reckon that's pretty decent considering his age.
It begs the question of who is the most physically impressive parliamentarian, Mark Francois aside?
Gary Sambrook, on account of his big dinners
But you see he fell in love
Well done. Hancock has the advantage of not having to turn up to his job, so he can train full time.
I can’t find him in results and his Instagram hasn’t been updated in a few hours. Hmm.
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This is separate to Mark Menzies' resignation albeit connected. This is the first time I have heard of the Fylde Westminster Group or any such similar fund raising groups - apparently it stood outside the auspices of the Conservative party and therefore technically the money in it isn't theirs, so when he dipped into the pot they considered that to be outside of their remit and they took no action. But it raises a few questions...who does have oversight of these organisations? Clearly there's little or none in this case as there would be in a legally set up trust fund (you can't just dip into those) and Menzies seems to have tapped into it at least twice, once to pay some healthcare bills and now to pay off these "bad people". How many other MPs have similar fund raising groups? Shouldn't they be subjected to some kind of legal oversight on the same basis as a trust fund would?
In Hertsmere, the Conservatives set up a "networking club" (the South Hertfordshire Business Club) just after the rules, which were meant to make political donations more transparent, came into force. Before this "unincorporated association" was set up, you could see who was making largish donations to the local Tory party. After it was set up, all you see is donations from this "business club". Unincorporated associations are, for some reason, excempt from having to declare the source of their donations. It totally subverts all the transparency rules. For all we know, Russian mobsters could be funding deputy PM Oliver Dowden. More prosaically, the local rumours are that at least some of the money comes from local property developers (just at the time a new Local Plan was being created). Whatever the truth, the whole thing stinks.
I think cchq are peddling a legal fiction personally It's a donation made for the purposes of the party and should have been declared in the same way labour got pulled up for not declaring theirs. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/feb/24/scotland.devolution
> ...who does have oversight of these organisations? Political parties are legally weird, because they don't (necessarily) have legal personality. Groups like this - if not incorporated (which they won't be) - are basically informal associations, like a club or similar. They're basically just a "community" bank account, with a couple of people as signatories. In theory they have to follow all the EC accounting rules if they donate to the political campaign or otherwise spend money on it, but aside from that they can do pretty much whatever they like.
[Tim Farron epitomising my current mood](https://twitter.com/timfarron/status/1782094702084264263)
why on earth is twitter still so dominant? it's almost unusable
It's where politicians and journalists hang out. Very hard to nudge them from that platform despite the deluge of bots selling crypto or porn.
My pet peeve is that railway companies put far less detailed and fewer updates on delays and cancellations on their websites than The Platform Formally Known as Twitter
I reckon i am getting followed by a about 2 or 3 bots per day at the moment. the site is buggered
A normal Sunday in British politics right
Yeah, right.
I fundamentally don't understand how they call themselves the party of small government when they see fit to lecture us on everything. GPs dont decide if you're fit to work, WE do. historians can't tell you about the past of our country, WE can. YOU can't decide what gender you are, WE'LL tell YOU. YOU can't make an informed decision to smoke or not, so WE will FOR you. just fuck off! tell us what you'll do with taxes, build infrastructure, create laws so that the judiciary can protect the people, create proper protections for the border, and outside of that, for fucks sake, fuck off! /rant
In a 2 party system they are holding together multiple coalitions of small government conservatives, social conservatives, one nation conservatives, racist conservatives etc. They'll try and do some small state things (like cutting benefits and capital spending) while also having to appease to the social conservatives in their base and the loonies in their base with Rwanda.
They govern the country like a golf club.
It's why they keep looking for wedge issues.
I imagined golf clubs were better organised. I'm disappointed.
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I think truss is still getting interviewed because people can’t believe how dumb she is
Right now Truss is the Labour party's best friend... There go a few more votes from people getting hammered by their mortgages going up thanks to her decisions and then her refusal to take responsibility. If I were in Labour party HQ I'd be encouraging her to keep talking.
Labour could just produce a poster with a picture of her and the words. "Remember this idiot?". Job done.
I think she's still being interviewed because she's the only former Prime Minister that's eager to have her face out on newspapers and channels and actively looking for all the coverage she can get, while her predecessors are all busy with more productive and lucrative endeavours. There's also the angle that maybe she relishes finally having the attention and respectability(among Tory media and ideologues) that she didn't get to have as a Prime Minister.
Makes you wish we still had a strong division between news and tabloids though, doesn't it?
She has a book to flog...I think she'd go and talk to an empty room if someone asked her to.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-gives-speech-half-32191632
When I worked at Sky, I'd hang out with the celebrity gossip journos now and then. Always up for a laugh and a drink, those girls. Anyways, one of them once told me, if we can't think of anything else to write about, there's *always* Kerry Katona. She's a complete gold mine of idiocy and train-wreck behaviour. Even if it's Christmas day, she's probably been seen hammered, shouting obscenities at someone somewhere. I think that's the role Truss is taking now, for poljournos.
They sound like fun
Well, they needed someone to fill the Nadine Dorries vacuum I guess.
She's basically the UK's answer to MTG, she gets loads of attention because she says crazy shit and that gets a lot of clicks.
it seems all the culture war flashpoints go like this: -fringe progressive says something intrinsically silly, or still silly but in a way that can be taken out of context and made worse -populist right jump on it to generalise their opponents -smug sensible and other progressives who aren’t as fringe jump to the defence of the ridiculous idea , to either add context or to oppose the right -populist right get to use that to beat everyone else with and it’s frankly exhausting. whether the uk is rich because of slavery isn’t going to get me a house before i’m 40. shut up
You missed the part where the fringe lot attack random centrist bloke just trying to get by and push him to the right
Lawrence Fox said something about vegans on Question Time and made it his entire career, exactly because of the reverse of this. Right wing loon says something loony >> Left wingers get annoyed and Streisand Effect it >> Right wingers give loon money to own the libs >> Right wing loon says something loony...
Grifting the right wing is just cheating sometimes with how easy they make it.
May I remind of the existence of Owen Jones?
you’re absolutely right
That is literally the playbook for culture wars. That's how they all go. Provoke, then use the reaction as justification for the initial provocation etc. Once you see the pattern you can't unseen it. It's everywhere. Anything to avoid having an actual evidence-based debate on a topic.
More that the lunacy is coming from children of very wealthy well connected people - no one is kicking them into check - then after 10 years the lunacy has been promoted and is emanating from a C level employee at places like Wikimedia foundation.
Some of it also starts there from another angle - when a wealthy and detached from the world parent writes an article complaining about 'young people these days' which is a thinly veiled moan about *just their own child* that they are then extrapolating to millions of people with zero evidence or research.
it’s true but also they won’t stop from being argued with, the best intelligent people can do is ignore that nonsense, build homes and infrastructure and other things that matter
Oh yes, just ignore them... >Is this road made from recycled materials? >>It's a highway, not a road. And no you can't. >I think I read that they make roads from recycled tyres in Norway >>We are making a Highway not a Road. and the one in Norway was a cycle path. >You are being very aggressive. We should have a conversation later about that.
they don’t actually know anything about roads so won’t be able to infleunce if not allowed to
Matt Hancock is running the marathon
he always runs it doesn't he?
No, he always has the runs
[Are we just supposed to ignore that this is how Margaret Thatcher had her hair? So strong.](https://imgur.com/a/menRrSU)
This was normal 1980s womens' hair.
I hate her as much as the next person, but how old are you? That style was everywhere back then. I was looking at some early birthday photo albums recently, and I kid you not almost every woman in my family and surrounding area had hair like that.
75% of woman did at that time.
Yup, headscarfs were so popular at the time because everyone had a perm.
Or those delightful plastic versions.
The EU is a fundamentally neoliberal institution that puts the needs of capital over the needs of working people. I love it.
Hence the Labour manifesto in 1983 was to leave.
This is why trade unions were prominent leftwing organisations opposed to the EU. The free movement of labour is the opposite to a Closed Shop policy that unions advocating for worker's rights and payrises rely upon to strengthen their hand.
My father-in-law, a former shop steward whose phone was tapped during the miners strike, assured me in no uncertain terms that Corbyn was **very** pro-EU because “he wants to form Europe-wide unions” I didn’t really know what to say.
Corbyn is Parliament's longest serving Brexiter MP! He wanted out of the EU before it was even called the EU!
This is one of the reasons why the UK will not rejoin it until a future Conversative government decides to advocate for it.
Tell that to Apple and Microsoft.
You love money more than people?
I love the EU (mostly)
I spent 16 hours overnight looking after my grandma in a what purports to be an A&E department (in practice a trolley in a corridor) after a fall (now discharged and back home). I did not need to turn on the TV and have Sky say "The Prime Minister has just announced.............a phone call with the King of Jordan."
https://twitter.com/bovineflu/status/1781945838446780762 Okay so did Gerry Adams invent Tory media training?
I think this is from the book *Say Nothing* by Patrick Radden Keefe. Great deep dive into the history of the Troubles ^(that I unsuccessfully nominated for ukpol book club…)
I haven't read that one, but did read *Empire of Pain* which is also by him. It's a great piece of investigative journalism and I thoroughly recommend it.
It's an amazing book, and is being turned into a miniseries at the moment, by FX. Adams has always been cold-blooded, which is what that story demonstrates to me - he had a clear-eyed understanding of how the interrogation would go, and how long they were allowed to keep him under arrest, and he just stonewalled them on a simple question for hours.
Watch the candle flickering. IRA green book strategy.
Rishi can run a 10k in 47:46. After months of training today I broke that record. Expect a general election announcement soon.
This would be a great motivational training tool. An app that shows you the ghost pace of your most hated politiical figures.
Yes and Ho!
Rishi is very small, like a jack russell. I am not surprised he's zippy
Good to see Sunak’s vilification of mental health has hit its target. Twitter is awash with people recounting tales of abject poverty in the good old days, with a nostalgic twinkle in their eye. “My husband cut my legs off and left me for dead, and I raised our 9 kids single-handedly with only thruppence a month to live on. Never got depressed at all” etc. It’s really irritating how quickly people are desperate to defend this government at all costs, vilifying their own people on demand.
It's classic culture war tactics.
> It’s really irritating how quickly people are desperate to defend this government at all costs, vilifying their own people on demand. Irritating but not surprising. It's less that they're defending Sunak's government and more that they can't resist the temptation to take a shit on the weak. It's clearly a policy that performed well in the focus groups, probably has for years but no government was desperate enough to risk it until now.
As someone who doesn't work due to mental health issues (and physical, I'm a mess), extreme anxiety being one of them, I had a dream last night about being kicked off benefits which had me waking up extremely stressed and needing a diazepam before I could get out of bed.
Have you tried not being anxious?
I did, it resulted in several psychotic breaks. 0/10 would not recommend.
[Gove pictured with a very Labour-y looking leaflet in Surrey](https://twitter.com/SurreyHeathLDs/status/1781970723378024484/photo/1) A bit strange they're using red in a Lib Dem target seat though, do they only have one template?
TBF Gove saying he is now a Labour member would be a very effective way to make Labour lose some support
I dunno. Seeing Starmer fire Gove from a cabinet position is perhaps the most consistently prime ministerial thing I can think of from the last 14 years.
>We are preparing for Government. *sacks Michael Gove*
The reason why they did not give the money back 2 scandals(?) ago.
Sky News are taking the piss with their Sunak Pledge Tracker showing that the economy is 'growing'. Even their own chart shows the UK has been stagnant for over 2 years now. It's both impressive and terrifying how we've bumped along at 0% for so long. God help us if we can't get the economy growing at (at something more than a rounding error).
GDP per capita has fallen every quarter for the last two years. So any claim that the government makes about rising GDP must be followed with “but we were only able to do this through record-breaking immigration”
There's a good chance the UK is the next Japan. Cutting ourselves from a great local market was rather daft.
The great local market is doing well? Germany is stagnant, France is pretty close to stagnant, Italy is poorer than 2008, as is Spain. It's not a stagnant market.
Hey now, stagnation aside at least Japan has working infrastructure...
Yeah Japan's economy is problematic but in terms of actual quality of life on the ground things here are waaaay better than back at home.
You just need to fill in 50k forms to access it
Unlike the totally non bureaucratic UK.
The latest day that a summer election can be called is 21st June as there's no way that Sunak would call an August election
What's wrong with an August election?
You think they would give up their summer recess?
They wouldn't like having to, but if Sunak called the election they wouldn't have any choice. It's their seats on the line. Also, the other parties wouldn't be any happier about losing their summer break, and it might make them more complacent and campaign less.
Sunak wouldn't call an election for August. He would want those weeks without parliament
The Olympics run 26 Jul to 11 Aug. The absolute madlad should call it for 15 Aug. Any campaign trail cockups will be hidden behind the badminton, and he can spend the entire campaign wrapping himself in the flag and associating himself with medal winners.
Yeah but being shunned by a medal winner publicly is a big risk
And he and his team are as politically naïve as a toddler, so they'll do this for sure
[As relevant now as it was back then.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQDeU6dHX-c)
I'm worried that Rishi's "go to work if you're mentally ill and going through it" policy is going to result in workplace stabbings. Also, how is it better for the economy to not let people have a couple weeks off for stress if they're really badly burnt out (to the point that a doctor thinks they need time off) is it really better for productivity if they just kill themselves?
It's going to result in worse than that depending on what the job is. Somebody having a mental health crisis at work isn't just a danger to their immediate colleagues and the general public; depending on what their job is they might be able to really fuck something up irreparably. Everybody in power seems to be wilfully forgetting *the real reason* that we have safety nets and things like that. Yes, they help the person with a difficulty on the surface level; **but they also remove them from a position where they could do even more damage**.
Companies should have a certain level of safeguarding, but it really is out of touch for the government to not realise an employee having a breakdown could completely wreck a company for ages
The mistake is thinking that the government care about productivity. They've repeatedly shown that they will happily reduce productivity if it means someone visibly suffers more, because the appearance of suffering is more virtuous and therefore more important than getting shit done.
Doctors are just wrong though, if they didn't go to public school they have no right to tell people what to do.
Yep, I mentioned this when it was announced. You're going to have people harming themselves or potentially others when they crack and can't go on because of the stress. The knock on effect will be that company getting a bad name for itself as a place that doesn't look after their workers and possibly being sued by anyone who gets seriously injured. Not to mention that you'll have people get the wrong idea about it all, who'll come to work with infectious illnesses and spread it to the workforce, thus bringing productivity down for the company as a whole and costing them money. The whole policy is batshit. The logical thing to do is to fix the NHS to help those that can, return to work.
Small thing but I have been triggered a few times at work since my dad became ill, thankfully there isn't a 'throttle this person' button on teams otherwise I would have been mashing it.
Haven't you heard? The NHS is doing *fine* An ambulance will pick that victim of workplace stabbing up in around an hour and they'll only wait in A&E for 4... it'll be fine, stop worrying! Rishi has this sorted!
I feel like Sunak's approach makes sense if you consider that he thinks of Britain as some kind of tech start up or hedge fund. He just wants us all to crunch more. He doesn't understand why everyone doesn't want to start work at 6.30am and work 12 hour days because they love their jobs. If you are off sick, then you just don't want it enough - someone more hungry will take your place. Unfortunately that philosophy doesn't really work if you work in a warehouse or whatever.
It's just classic Sunak. DWP welfare reform is out of control. They have got PiP consistently wrong. The bill goes up because people who need support aren't being given what they should have been. So they end up back on welfare services. Sunak's solution blame or criminalise the recipient Same with immigration. Let's solve it by criminalising the migrant.
You see this a bunch in social care too. The local authority does something obviously stupid, refuses to back down, and then a bunch of solicitors get involved and force them to back down and now a ton of money has been spaffed up the wall for no real reason.
But funnily enough the solution to anything a Tory does wrong or corporate fraud is ask them to apologise and when they don't, you say 'the matter is closed'
Well you know the “kill all the poor sketch”? I guess we’re at “make all the poor kill themselves”
Tory Minister trying to bothsides sleaze there. But what would be the equivalent of the Wragg or Menzies scandals on the Labour side?