And you'd need an enforcement agency like the Home Office in order to ensure they were wearing their clown suits in the first place

If they don't have a good plan B to help people who are elderly, infirm, frail, needing regular care etc then they are just an exercise in planless and licensed sadism. My mum had two falls in May and we would have been fucked if (foreign) carers hadn't been coming in on an initial (govt) package

I'm still not sure people entirely grasp this - it's very clear that, for the next 3 years at least, the US will increasingly be a strategic adversary and I really don't think we've cottoned onto what that means

Yes, very well put

I agree, but Blair and Campbell between them were a million times better at debating and articulating ideas than Starmer and McSweeney are now - it's easier to do command and control if you clearly have the best available operators in the first place

Well said. I think part of the problem is that McSweeney sees control as the way to win the debate whereas actually it is the other way round - you need to be good at explaining your ideas in order win people over. If HQ isn't good at this they need to ask *why*

My Party No My Party Neither Your Party Nor Your Party But My Party Fuck Off My Party Who Do You Think You Are

Looks like it, but Brown and May did a better or less bad job than the other successors of dealing with crisis moments and I'm not sure Labour are up to that 😬

I recently blocked someone who said 'look at France if you want an example of how something other than FPTP doesn't work' because I didn't have the energy to say 'look at Britain since 2010 and especially since 2016' lol

OK thx

That's spot on. It was daft Labour won so handily on 33.7% of the vote last time and it's daft Electoral Calculus has Reform just short of a majority on this recent poll when only at 25% of the vote. FPTP is stupid and increases public anger at top-down politics. We can take back (some) control

No, my life has been utterly mad recently so too preoccupied with other things - I'm only killing time here this morning whilst waiting for news about Personal Stuff...!

Yes fair. Clegg is so culpable in the country becoming dissolute I get more repelled by his 'look at me being soft-spoken and reasonable' self-degradation at each turn

The 2011 referendum was bloody awful and a sign of things to come. No mendaciously campaigned on 'keep one person one vote' (which FPTP blatantly isn't), Clegg allowed himself to be played by Cameron, Clegg should have shared a platform with Miliband and vice versa...it doesn't work as a template

OK thx x

Yes fair. Apologies

Lol fair enough - apologies, no slight intended

Exactly. The media *can* be unreliable but if you do this kind of signposting you shouldn't be surprised at the conclusions they derive from it

Yes, but that's the curse of politicians putting the national interest first (see also Callaghan and Healey 1976-9 and Brown and Darling 2008-10). At some point these maligned figures need to be rehabilitated because although they are clearly flawed they are not Johnsonian charlatans