Westminstenders: Manifesto or Bust?

[RedToothBrush]

The Brexit Party aren't doing one.

The Labour Party apparently can't afford theirs.

The Conservatives will just lie anyway.

And the LDs got upstaged by Prince Andrew's resignation from royal duties for being a fuckwit.

3 weeks to go...

Only a liberal elite complain about spelling. It's a lefty-trap like the Guardian quiz.

I completely disagree. My dad was as far from liberal elite as you can get. He was also a spelling and grammar pedant. As am I. Spelling and grammatical mistakes irritate almost every well educated person I know.

“ Corbyn is a wazzock, but the principle of
better services funded by taxation rather than debt
is what I'll vote for.”
Amen!

I agree, Amazon, Google etc should pay any applicable UK taxes on whatever income/profits they generate from sales into the UK, you'll get no contrary argument from me on that.

From that, and other comments here, you should be much closer to a Labour point of view than Tory ...

It's a little like the greatest trick the devil pulled was to convince people he didn't exist. The greatest trick the Tories pulled is convincing people they are Tories ...

Ken Livingstone detailed it in "If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It" as Mrs Thatchers completely unremarked legacy. He's still right.

I completely disagree. My dad was as far from liberal elite as you can get. He was also a spelling and grammar pedant. As am I. Spelling and grammatical mistakes irritate almost every well educated person I know.

might want to leave the internet then

I try my best, simply because I have spent my entire life writing one way or another and it's an ingrained habit. But given the usage of mobile screens with crappy UIs and an autocorrect that dispels any faith in machine learning, it's hard to be too picky. Certainly I try not to use spelling and grammar as a proxy for intelligence because it's a stupid thing to do, and marks out stupid people.

There's a certain irony in people praising the subtle beauties of English compared to all that foreign muck whilst simultaneously berating people for daring to explore it.

There's also Muphrys' Law

I know some here have seen Dave Gormans wry look at modern mondegreens on Twitter, but most of them can be attributed to modern spell checkers as much as ignorance.

Anyway, language evolves. After all, we're not French.

Jon Trickett
@jon_trickett
·
12m
The crowd in Sheffield right now outside the bbc leaders debate waiting for Jeremy to arrive

twitter.com/i/status/1197925740530024449

Avoid IT projects run by this man - his understanding of percentages is rather poor
www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/bbc-question-time-man-who-20935155

.

Love that DG. It's mind boggling that people can't see why these billionaires are pushing Tory propaganda...it isn't for OUR benefit, is it?!

I love this ad

twitter.com/NaveedMediator/status/1197889661470957568

Bit of a tangent from Brexit - it's the Prince Andrew interview, but it's good for anyone who needs a chuckle.

Fiona Hill: "I applied to Oxford in the '80s and was invited to an interview. It was like a scene from Billy Elliot: people were making fun of me for my accent and the way I was dressed. It was the most embarrassing, awful experience I had ever had in my life."

You'd hope that things have improved but videos like the one of the blind man being assaulted at the Oxford Union suggests they haven't really. Oxford is still full of privileged kids.

This isn't exclusive to the U.K. by any means. France is only a meritocracy on the surface. My DD had an interview at Sciences Po (where posh French kids go to study PPE) and it was awful - wrong background, wrong accent. She did get an offer but turned it down because she hated the interview experience so much.

This one is even on topic

Just saw a Lindt advert and immediately thought of BigChoc

I only found out today that the Oxford Union is a private club with a hefty subscription.

In my naivity I always assumed it was the Oxford Students' Union and they were all members. (But then I went to Scumbag Poly so what do I know?)

"Ra! Ra! Ra! Let's bash the oiks!"

"Vegetable Rights and Peace"

I only found out today that the Oxford Union is a private club with a hefty subscription.

It's quite interesting how many bodies you think are public, aren't.

ACPO (now disappeared) for example was a private company. Which they used to evade FoI requests. Now a tactic like that would not go down well in the US where courts (and judges) take very dimly to the notion that the state can palm of it's liabilities by just outsourcing them (some interesting court cases to prove it).

The "Oh, but we're a private company" has also been used by care providers in the UK to evade scrutiny and culpability under the HRA. And until the court case is bought that torpedoes the tactic, will continue to do so.

And of course The Brexit Party is a private company. Without a website.

tobee
< smiles fondly at full Lindt drawer >

This isn't exclusive to the U.K. by any means. France is only a meritocracy on the surface.

If Dan Snow is to be believed, the reason the Royal Navy was so good at beating seven shades of shit out of their French counterparts, prior to Pax Britannica was because it was built on merit, whereas the French insisted on an aristocratic command structure.

Of course Napoleon changed all that ...

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery ....

Farage aiming for Labour Leave voters with a manifesto that cribs from Corbyn - ffs free broadband ! - he obviously thinks that policy is a winner

Lewis Goodall@lewis_goodall

Plenty of more statist stuff in here:
industrial policy, subsidy of specific industries “free of EU rules on state aid”)

and funnily enough, free broadband.

Just found this video ...
quite long but Sacha Baron Cohen was (with Chris Morris) one of the true pioneers of fake news
and understands the danger of the greatest propaganda machine in history

Somerville, I'm so sorry your DD is going through this. Glad to read the prognosis is good.

DG If you read C S Forester as a kid,

you'd know that the RN used to win engagements even against heavy odds,
mainly because Spain, France & other European rivals chose captains and admirals on the basis of noble birth,

whereas the RN was the main opportunity in Britain for the mc to rise on merit from Midshipman to fame & fortune as a successful captain,
or even occasionally rise from the lower deck to captain.

DG If you read C S Forester as a kid

Well I won't now we have real Hornblowers to follow

I may be making this up (sorry if I am DM ) but "Star Trek" was supposed based on the Hornblower novels which Roddenberry grew up with.

Of course Admiral Byng might have "encouraged" sailors too ?

Unfortunately, Britain did not move with the times in the 20th and 21st centuries and is now one of the Western countries with the least social mobility
More surprising, over the last 40 years or so, the USA has become nearly as bad

it may be because access to higher education and also the social networks formed at school and uni over generations now have far more effect than before, particularly in the UK and US

Ironically it is the expansion of higher education that has seen social mobility choked off as the idiot children of the sharp-elbowed professional classes infest the universities.

Can't have upward mobility without a little bit of downward mobility.