Topic: Never mind 'Stop the Boats' - STOP THE TORIES

[Jiminy Cricket]

Wilf? Thats what he called him?

Hopefully, the Johnsons - in the event they have a daughter - will resist the temptation to have children with rhyming names.

[Wullie160975]

Reminds me of that Coupling episode where Patrick gets called Wilf and takes it as an insult.

Also, Wilf is 2. What would a 2 year old be doing in a treehouse? Johnson really does believe he'll be PM for a generation, doesn't he? I'm sure some other Tory no-mark said last year his ambition was to have a longer tenure than Thatcher's .

The article said in autumn 2020, so he'd have barely been 6 months old then.

[lobsterboy]

Reminds me of that Coupling episode where Patrick gets called Wilf and takes it as an insult.

Also, Wilf is 2. What would a 2 year old be doing in a treehouse? Johnson really does believe he'll be PM for a generation, doesn't he? I'm sure some other Tory no-mark said last year his ambition was to have a longer tenure than Thatcher's .

He intends it to be a job for life and then pass it on to one the kids.
A fucking dictator.

[PaulF]

Hopefully, the Johnsons - in the event they have a daughter - will resist the temptation to have children with rhyming names.

What rhymes with Wilf though? Bilf? I can't think of any girls name that rhymes.

[Red Beret]

What rhymes with Wilf though? Bilf? I can't think of any girls name that rhymes.

Milf?  Oh wait, that's something else entirely...

[Jiminy Cricket]

What rhymes with Wilf though? Bilf? I can't think of any girls name that rhymes.

There is only one word I can think of which rhymes with 'Wilf'.

Milf?  Oh wait, that's something else entirely...

[Red-Soldier]

There is only one word I can think of which rhymes with 'Wilf'.

How about Gilf.....

[Jiminy Cricket]

How about Gilf.....

I had to look up that. Obviously, a more niche interest!

[Red-Soldier]

Burnham speaking sense:

Andy Burnham says Labour must ‘seize moment’ and back proportional representation

Writing in the Observer, mayor of Manchester says Tory byelection defeats should open the way for consensus and radical reform

Labour should back proportional representation for Westminster elections to allow more cooperation between political parties on a programme of urgently needed social reform, says Andy Burnham.

Writing for the Observer in the aftermath of two byelection defeats for the Tories, brought about in part by tactical voting by Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters, the mayor of Greater Manchester says PR should be at the heart of an entirely new approach to politics and policymaking.

Burnham insists he is not talking about any form of “electoral pact” involving Labour and other parties, and that his intervention is not part of a leadership bid against Keir Starmer. “This is nothing of the sort,” he says. “I am doing this because I want Keir to seize the moment.”

But off the back of the byelections, he argues there is now an opportunity for the Tories’ opponents to work together more. Doing so, they could create a political system in which power is spread more evenly and fairly, rather than being concentrated in what he describes as a “small Whitehall elite” as a result of a first-past-the-post election system, which traditionally has favoured the Tories.

Changing the voting system, a move likely to boost small parties and increase the chances of coalitions, would foster a spirit of consensus and agreement on other radical and necessary elements of political modernisation, such as replacing the House of Lords with an elected second chamber and more devolution.

“What I am proposing is cooperating now on a programme for political reform. At a grassroots level, Labour is moving towards support for PR,” he says.

“If the party as a whole were to embrace it, it paves the way for agreement with other parties on wider reforms: an elected senate of the nations and regions to replace the Lords and maximum devolution of power out of Westminster.”

These new structures, with the number of MPs from different parties better reflecting the votes cast, would then pave the way for cooperation and consensus on key challenges facing the country, the Manchester mayor suggests.

Instead, today’s Conservative government was an example of paralysis and dysfunction, in which the governing party was seeking division with its opponents in a desperate effort to stay in power, rather than focusing on the urgent national issues affecting the British people.

“Just when we needed a grown-up government, we got one which is not governing but is campaigning for its own survival by inflaming divides and starting fights,” Burnham writes.

A spirit of cooperation was needed on issues such as housing, social care, and public services, with the same urgency as after the second world war.

Burnham adds: “My starter for10 would be: good housing as a human right in UK law and a major council housebuilding programme to make it real; a higher basic minimum income for all and the end to insecure employment; social care on NHS terms and a substantial increase in mental health spending: and the re-nationalisation of rail and re-regulation of bus services.

“Whatever the precise policy programme, the enormity of the change needed can’t be denied and will require consensus and political foundations to sustain it for a generation or more.”

Labour policy is not to support PR for Westminster elections although several motions on the issue will be put to the party’s conference in September. The country’s largest union Unison recently backed PR for Westminster elections at its annual conference in a move welcomed by electoral reform campaigners as a “huge boost”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/25/andy-burnham-says-labour-must-seize-moment-and-back-proportional-representation

[Jiminy Cricket]

Burnham speaking sense:

Andy Burnham says Labour must ‘seize moment’ and back proportional representation

Writing in the Observer, mayor of Manchester says Tory byelection defeats should open the way for consensus and radical reform

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/25/andy-burnham-says-labour-must-seize-moment-and-back-proportional-representation

Absolutely. I argued this only yesterday and have done for a while here. It is imperative that there are root and branch changes to how elections are held and government operates in the UK. I'm on board with everything Burnham suggests there.

[Circa1892]

Johnson eying up Zelensky to speak at the Tory Party conference.

You’d hope he’d see through this…

[Robinred]

Johnson eying up Zelensky to speak at the Tory Party conference.

You’d hope he’d see through this…

Shameless, opportunistic, conniving twat with no honour, no scruples and no conscience.

Surely his time will soon be up?

[andy07]

Shameless, opportunistic, conniving twat with no honour, no scruples and no conscience.

Surely his time will soon be up?

Will go in the Autumn.  That gives him another four months to do more damage to the Tories but unfortunately more damage to the country. 

[thaddeus]

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson planned £150,000 treehouse for son Wilf at Chequers

https://archive.ph/DImZ6#selection-1043.0-1453.249

Urgh.  Lord Brownlow (/any other donor) gifts Johnson (/any other Tory MP) a relatively small sum of money in exchange for a contract or policy change costing the taxpayer a sum many times larger.  Robert Jenrick saving Richard Desmond over £40m from an infrastructure levy to Tower Hamlets council comes to mind - not a bad return on a £10k investment to the Tory party!

And they have the bare-faced cheek to criticise Labour receiving funding from unions.

[thaddeus]

Johnson eying up Zelensky to speak at the Tory Party conference.

You’d hope he’d see through this…

Johnson will imply that Ukraine will get a few £bn of high tech heavy artillery to convince Zelensky to take part.  By the time Zelensky realises Johnson has given him his Billy Bunter slingshot and some third-hand water cannons it will be too late.

[thaddeus]

Burnham speaking sense:

Andy Burnham says Labour must ‘seize moment’ and back proportional representation

Writing in the Observer, mayor of Manchester says Tory byelection defeats should open the way for consensus and radical reform

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/25/andy-burnham-says-labour-must-seize-moment-and-back-proportional-representation

Burnham gets it.  The kind of policies he's outlined there will never receive a better reception than right now.  I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a person that knows what Labour's main policies are at the moment and "we're not the Tories" will only take them so far.

[Fromola]

Burnham speaking sense:

Andy Burnham says Labour must ‘seize moment’ and back proportional representation

Writing in the Observer, mayor of Manchester says Tory byelection defeats should open the way for consensus and radical reform

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/25/andy-burnham-says-labour-must-seize-moment-and-back-proportional-representation

This is exactly what Blair should have done in the 90s and a key reason why his premiership was such a waste.

PR would also be the end of the Tories having unlimited power to wreak havoc and pillage and wreck the country with 40% of the vote, while the majority of the electorate that backed other parties are basically ignored in Westminster. For all the shit Nick Clegg has to answer for, at least the Lib Dems reigned in a lot of the worst excesses of the Tories in that 2010-2015 parliament and the policy successes were generally theirs. If you have PR, then any future Tory government would be reigned in by other parties.

[filopastry]

Burnham blows with the wind, he likes PR at present because Labour members like it and he wants the leadership.

AV may have been a pretty shit form of PR but he didn't want to campaign on it either way when there was the referendum on it.

[Fromola]

Burnham blows with the wind, he likes PR at present because Labour members like it and he wants the leadership.

AV may have been a pretty shit form of PR but he didn't want to campaign on it either way when there was the referendum on it.

He can but he's admitted he's grown and seen things differently since leaving the Westminster bubble. We also know ourselves he will fight and battle for a cause he believes in.

Look at the state of the current Labour front bench and Burnham is a much better prospect. Starmer is an absolute non entity. By sheer timing and Tory meltdown he's looking likely to be Prime Minister in a year or two, probably in coalition with Lib Dems and maybe others, but he doesn't seem to have anything fresh to offer and just the same establishment man Blair was.

[TSC]

He can but he's admitted he's grown and seen things differently since leaving the Westminster bubble. We also know ourselves he will fight and battle for a cause he believes in.

Look at the state of the current Labour front bench and Burnham is a much better prospect. Starmer is an absolute non entity. By sheer timing and Tory meltdown he's looking likely to be Prime Minister in a year or two, probably in coalition with Lib Dems and maybe others, but he doesn't seem to have anything fresh to offer and just the same establishment man Blair was.

Anyone with an ounce of competence would steamroller the current shower of shit in power. The bar is so low it’s impossible to get under it.

[TSC]

Unsurprisingly the narcissist shows no indication of going anywhere

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61939938

[Circa1892]

“ We've embarked on a massive project to change the government, of the constitution of the country, the way we run our legal system, the way we manage our borders, our economy. All sorts of things we are doing differently.”

The fat c*nt in the same interview where he says he sees himself as PM in 15 years time.

Anyone who doesn’t vote tactically in the next election can get to fuck. The absolute shambles of Labour throwing resources at Golders Green to tip it over to the Tories can’t happen again.

It’ll be easy to deprive them of a majority (very very hard to stop them being the biggest party in England), lots of nose holding needed for a few years yet.

[Circa1892]

Unsurprisingly the narcissist shows no indication of going anywhere

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61939938

Also. Surely a fourth term?

[Nobby Reserve]

For all the shit Nick Clegg has to answer for, at least the Lib Dems reigned in a lot of the worst excesses of the Tories in that 2010-2015 parliament and the policy successes were generally theirs. If you have PR, then any future Tory government would be reigned in by other parties.

Have you got any examples of that?

Because that coalition government forced through the biggest cuts to public spending in UK history, including cutting local authority budgets beyond the bone and slashing 30k police officers). They tripled tuition fees. They froze education budgets.

The only concession the Lib Dems seemed to get was a referendum on PR, and they even bollocksed that up by allowing the Tory scum to attach a blatent gerrymandering clause to it.

[Nobby Reserve]

Burnham speaking sense:

Andy Burnham says Labour must ‘seize moment’ and back proportional representation

Writing in the Observer, mayor of Manchester says Tory byelection defeats should open the way for consensus and radical reform

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/25/andy-burnham-says-labour-must-seize-moment-and-back-proportional-representation

That reads like an opening gambit for a leadership bid.

Perhaps he's had a tip-off from Durham Police 


I personally was disappointed with Burnham's anaemic leadership campaign in 2015. And he stormed into a Tory trap over Covid lockdown in Manchester.

But he is figure that would poll well in the red wall seats, without having the sort of baggage that Corbyn did to scare off centrists and moderate Tories. Put a competent team around him to guide and sharpen policy direction and he would likely help hammer the Tories.

[No666]

I don't think the raising of the income tax threshold would have happened without the Lib Dems. Osborne didn't give a stuff about people at the lower end of the scale, and it wasn't in the Tory party manifesto.

[Red-Soldier]

The Snoopers Charter was brought in post election win in 2015.  Loads of other examples of regressive policies brought in after they got their majority.

[filopastry]

That reads like an opening gambit for a leadership bid.

Perhaps he's had a tip-off from Durham Police 


I personally was disappointed with Burnham's anaemic leadership campaign in 2015. And he stormed into a Tory trap over Covid lockdown in Manchester.

But he is figure that would poll well in the red wall seats, without having the sort of baggage that Corbyn did to scare off centrists and moderate Tories. Put a competent team around him to guide and sharpen policy direction and he would likely help hammer the Tories.

Burnham's on continual leadership manoeuvres, anytime there is any kind of negative press about Starmer he normally pops up with some comment or other.

[Fromola]

Have you got any examples of that?

Because that coalition government forced through the biggest cuts to public spending in UK history, including cutting local authority budgets beyond the bone and slashing 30k police officers). They tripled tuition fees. They froze education budgets.

The only concession the Lib Dems seemed to get was a referendum on PR, and they even bollocksed that up by allowing the Tory scum to attach a blatent gerrymandering clause to it.

A good rundown here of what they did and didn't achieve: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/15/how-much-of-the-liberal-democrats-2010-election-manifesto-was-implemented

Nick Clegg was a disaster for the country, no doubt there, and the Lib Dems have a lot to answer for for enabling them, no use in being sheepish now when the country has been ran into the ground. Cameron also gambled on promising a referendum, expecting another coalition at best, knowing Lib Dems would block it.

Once the Lib Dems left the few reasonable Lib Dem policies were going to go and be replaced by more Tory shite.

[Circa1892]

Burnham's on continual leadership manoeuvres, anytime there is any kind of negative press about Starmer he normally pops up with some comment or other.

The problem for Burnham would be if Durham police did get rid of Starmer/Rayner (probably at the time of a completely unconnected  boost to their funding from the Home Office) - he wouldn’t be the next leader? Only way would be if one of them stood down as an MP and Burnham went for the seat?

[Jshooters]

Interesting way for The Times to display data 

[thaddeus]

Interesting way for The Times to display data 

I'm clearly out of touch but I expected better than that from The Times.  Horrible illiteracy from them.

[Elmo!]

Have they been hiring from the Lib Dem graphics team?

[thaddeus]

Forwarded on from a former colleague in our local Tory county council.  He'd just been told that the project he'd spent two years working on - migrating from on-premise servers to Azure - has had its funding stopped.  He's not sure if the ~60% of things in Azure can stay there on the metered charging or if he's going to spend the next year bringing them all back onto physical servers.  Or, as he put it, "I'll be a cost saving and it will crash and burn".  I have a slightly vested interest in having shunted some of those processes to Azure but I have to say the costs never stacked up on it in the first place!

Medium Term Financial Strategy

At the cabinet today the county council leader Toadying Tory, described the county council’s worsening financial position as frightening.

The cabinet has therefore asked for further work to be undertaken urgently to reduce capital expenditure, including a possible moratorium on non-essential capital expenditure, and to identify other savings in addition to those set out in February in the council’s four-year Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS). You can read about the current pressures on our finances in detail in the cabinet report.

Those pressures include recent national and global events, a steep rise in inflation, a surge in the cost of providing social care for adults and children, and ongoing increases in the National Living Wage (which mean finding millions of extra pounds in salary costs). In addition, our funding status – we remain the lowest funded county council in the country – continues to be something on which we press our local MPs, and the Government, to get a fairer deal.

Previously the council calculated there would be an £8 million gap between what we need to spend and our income next year, but these pressures have widened that to around £20 million. By 2025/26 the budget gap is predicted to increase from £40 million to £70 million unless further action is taken.  That is why the cabinet has taken its decision today.

Following the cabinet meeting, Toadying Tory told the media: “In the same way households are struggling with rising costs, it is simply becoming more and more expensive for the council to provide services because inflation is galloping away – with not much prospect of things improving any time soon.
“When we set our budget in February we said our situation was bad. 
“Then Putin invaded Ukraine creating an economic aftershock that affects us and every council in a way that could not have been predicted.
“This means we are now going to have to consider the kind of savings which will be unpopular and which we try to avoid. Though no decisions have yet been taken I want to level with people about the frightening financial situation we face.”
Toadying Tory added: “Officers have been asked to start working urgently on new savings proposals which will have to include popular services such as support to businesses, highways maintenance, waste sites and buses, as well as in the more significant adults and children’s social care budgets.
“Neither can the inflationary impact on our £500 million capital programme be ignored and some existing schemes will need to be cancelled, mothballed or reduced in scope. We need to consider a moratorium on what is non-essential.
“We do not want to do this, but we know from experience that local authorities, like ours, which have reacted early to financial challenges have managed the best. Waiting to find out exactly how bad things will get serves only to limit our options later and leave us looking at knee-jerk decisions.”
An update on the extra savings is to be outlined to the council’s cabinet in September – I’ll update you further at that time.

So many issues running out of control and we have a government totally concerned with optics, constant electioneering and devising the next dead cat story.

[killer-heels]

That reads like an opening gambit for a leadership bid.

Perhaps he's had a tip-off from Durham Police 


I personally was disappointed with Burnham's anaemic leadership campaign in 2015. And he stormed into a Tory trap over Covid lockdown in Manchester.

But he is figure that would poll well in the red wall seats, without having the sort of baggage that Corbyn did to scare off centrists and moderate Tories. Put a competent team around him to guide and sharpen policy direction and he would likely help hammer the Tories.

He was fucking awful in that 2015 leadership bid but he is now the most obvious choice for the next leader. He has to ensure though he doesn't leave it too long though as his profile will massively wane.

[shy_talk]

Fairly clear banker bonus caps being removed as a sweetener/to prevent certain titans of finance pishing off to the continent and taking their business with them.
An awful lot of eggs in one basket now, and I can see 'the machine' setting up a future labour government to carry the can for the leading lights of london leaving.
Next big concern is when the tory-scum realise boris is a busted flush they set about a scorched earth policy and concentrate on doing harm instead of the day to day average harm doing they are so accustomed to.

This pain and suffering is just getting started, protests and marches rarely occur in the bleak midwinter.

[y2w902]

Interesting way for The Times to display data 

Do you have a link for this ?

[Jshooters]

I saw it here, I think it’s from the print version

https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2022/06/27/this-times-graphic-about-boris-johnsons-popularity-had-people-bellowing-into-their-breakfast/

[Nobby Reserve]

Do you have a link for this ?

The Times is paywalled

[Sangria]

The Times is paywalled

The link to the Poke article is sufficient to prove the reliability of the initial claim.