Wes Tender

Neck and neck in the polls. *yawn* The last poll I saw , despite having Smarmer ahead of Boris, still had the Conservatives ahead of Labour by a few points. My views on polls are well aired. So kindly explain how poll results are going to help when an election will probably be another four years away? I suggest that you calm down and wait another few years before crowing about meaningless polls. And please don't assume that you know what the average Conservative voter wants. Your opinions on the party show that frankly, you haven't got a clue.

I've had the same experience. God knows what's going on. I went online to renew my STs, only to find that you have to log on with user name and password. Password didn't work, but it explained that if you hadn't logged on since before July 13th 2020, you would have to apply for a new password, or some such rubbish. Click to apply and they send an email which you have to click to confirm and they will email an opportunity to change the password. Except that the email doesn't arrive, even after several attempts. It suggests that if you are having difficulties in logging into your account (that you used to have until they decided to change the password access to it), you can fill in a form and somebody will contact you within 2 days. Fed up with this, I decided to go to the ticket office, but found them all closed. It wasn't until I got back home that I saw that tickets could be purchased from the Saints shop. Now I read that the deadline for ST renewals has been extended by a day. This sort of inefficiency has me wondering whether they would have trouble organising a piss-up in a brewery.

It was difficult to know where to post it. On reflection, the news didn't warrant a new thread, as hardly anybody would be enthralled enough to care much about the party's new leader. I did consider a thread called "Sir Ed Davey and the death of the Lib Dem Party", but they are in their terminal throes of life anyway. Even a third of their own membership couldn't muster enough enthusiasm to vote in the election of their own leader. The only tenuous historical connection would be consideration of their decline from one of the two great political parties of the 19th and early 20th century into virtual political irrelevance.

So the Lib Dumbs have appointed Sir Ed Davey as their leader beating pan-sexual Layla Moran 2-1 in the vote. Well, there wasn't much choice from among their 11 MPs was there, and I suppose that he was the least bad option available, as hardly anybody will have heard of any of them, apart from the boy Farron, who didn't set the world on fire the last time he led the party. The last leader they had with more than an ounce of charisma, was Nick Clegg. What became of him? 😉

Looks like we could possibly complete a deal with Japan in a matter of weeks, against however many years it took the EU. And it is rumoured that we will have a better deal than them. As for deals with the USA, that remains to be seen. Again though, the EU had been seeking a USA deal for years.

Love it or loathe it, social media is the modern technological way that news and opinion is disseminated around the civilised democratic world nowadays. Because much of the mainstream media is biased, it is natural that people will seek alternative sources of information and opinion, whether that be You Tube, Twatter, Facebook, Instagram, email or other methods. It isn't possible to put this particular genie back in the bottle. The days of people relying on the National broadcasters like the BBC for news are long gone and they have lost their audiences because the public don't any longer respect their impartiality. The campaign to defund the BBC has arisen because they are increasingly irrelevant when all these alternative sources of information are available and the licence fee is effectively seen as a poll tax. It has always been right and proper in a capitalist society that people vote with their feet when it comes for paying for a service or a product. Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream made the mistake of expressing an opinion on the UK policy on "asylum seekers" on social media and saw their sales plummet after calls for their product to be boycotted for interfering in British politics. The BBC has also paid the price for its increasingly woke agenda and I understand that close to a million people have stopped paying their BBC licence fee during the past year or two. This latest episode over their vain attempts to curry favour with the Marxist BLM movement by meddling with a national institution like the Last Night of the Proms has been a gross error of judgement on their part and they deserve all the flak they get. At last Boris has seen fit to signal his discontent. Well done him.

It now appears that after the huge outcry in the media and social media following the BBC's announcement that they will be dropping Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia from The last night of the Proms because the songs are not woke, the BBC have now started to give ground to public opinion at last. Even a government minister gave them an earful. But on closer inspection, the announcement made by the BBC isn't a total about face. It says that a new arrangement of Jerusalem will be performed, along with orchestral versions of Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia. So not only are they going to meddle with Jerusalem, but they propose to drop the words of Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia, the words not only being the essence of both tunes, but the part that the entire controversy is about. Usually of course, an invited soprano sings Rule Britannia and the BBC Concert Choir sings Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem. I expect that if the BBC think that they can get away with this, they are going to be bitterly disappointed.

No, the biggest con in British history was us joining the Common Market, believing that it was always only going to be a trade agreement, when there was always an agenda for it to gradually morph into a federal organisation. But some remoaners like you still spout this mantra like a stuck record that those who voted for Brexit were all thick racists, and the remoaners still can't see why they lost the vote, when partly the reason was that they had invited a backlash against them by their infuriating condescendingly superior attitude. Unfortunately for you, the Brexit voters cast the majority vote in the referendum, so all you can do is bleat about how unfair it all was.

These are racists who live in semis. They are a group distinct to the usually more affluent detached racists.

The principal reason why your posts lack the weight to be taken seriously, is because you cannot acknowledge when others have principles if you disagree with them..

It seems that the BBC are attempting to surpass themselves in the wokeness stakes, considering banning Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia from The last night of the Proms. Apparently they will have a female conductor from Finland who considers that those songs offend her Black Lives Matter sensibilities. Well, fuck off back to Finland then. Why have a Finnish conductor at a concert event celebrating Britishness anyway? This is a step too far, BBC. Take a cue from your name; British Broadcasting Corporation. If the British part offends you, drop it, and we can appoint another national Broadcasting body, one which is proud of this country and its history and which is prepared to report the news without bias and your left-wing agenda. With luck, if this concert goes ahead without these mainstay anthems, somebody will organise a rival concert reinstating them. EU and LBGT rights flags will not be welcome, as they will not be deemed appropriate to this particular event.

Absolutely it was. That was the point at which Farage started UKIP and when Euro-scepticism grew in the Conservative Party and indeed across the political divide and around the country. As I have stated before, that was the point at which I wanted to leave the EU, because Maastricht was the first major step towards a federal Europe instead of the Common Market which I had actually campaigned to join. Major was PM then, and he should have allowed us a referendum on a Treaty that brought about such substantial changes to the EEC Treaty. As much as Clarke would like to rewrite history attempting to show Maggie Thatcher as a Europhile whilst ignoring her shift towards Euro-scepticism in her later years, she was gone before Maastricht, and her legacy would only have her contribution to the single market as an historical footnote of equal prominence to her Bruges speech and her success in gaining us a rebate to our contributions to the EU gravy train. Much as I like reminiscing over the Thatcher years and her incredible achievement of turning the country around from the position she inherited when it was known as the sick man of Europe, that was some considerable time and several subsequent PMs ago, and this is supposed to be thread about the current PM. Since that thread began, the Chinese virus intervened and it is arguable that that has had far more effect on the death of the United Kingdom than Boris has had. Would Labour have handled that crisis any better?

Ken Clarke was one of the wettest pro-Europeans in her government, and ever after, so it doesn't come as any surprise that he would want to be selective in his views on Maggie Thatcher's record as PM. He is correct that she started out as very pro-Europe (as did many of us), but then she became quite the Euro-sceptic. Clarke wishes to airbrush that out of his personal memory, because it doesn't help his pro-Europe stance to have the greatest post-war PM adopting an anti-Europe position later in her Premiership, thus marginalising him and others as the wets of the party. When she fought to get us our rebate from the EEC, the newspapers happily carried cartoons of her hand-bagging Delors. Clarke reckons that her Bruges speech was pretty mild, but it was not seen as such at the time. The Bruges Group was formed the year after, with her as the Honorary President. She would hardly have wished to have been the figurehead of a group formed to rally opinion against further and closer European integration had she been pro-Europe at the time. I also love Clarke's opinion suggesting also that it was some sort of myth that she loved cutting taxes. He appears to grudgingly admit that she made the first big cut, but wishes somehow to give more credit to Major for getting it 20%, when the original cut made by Maggie was massively bigger. I'm afraid that Clarke isn't a very reliable historian; his memory of events is very selective in my opinion.

Getting it wrong about Cummings' and Gove's education and it appears that there are serious deficiencies in yours, What is a nat? Is it the abbreviation for a nationalist? As for your little clip, I thank you for posting that, as it gives context to the quote. It clearly says that "some Tory MPs" don't care about poorer people and the NHS. There are some MPs who appear to be less caring of sections of society in each party, less so in the LIb Dumb Party of course, as they hardly have any MPs. Regarding the leadership of the party, it didn't say that they thought along those lines, merely that there was a public perception that they did. So it might assist you to recognise that this video was three years old and that since then the Tories have won an election with one of the biggest majorities in modern times, winning seats in Labour's red wall constituencies that have never before elected Tory MPs. Perhaps they recognised that had Corbyn's Labour Party won, they would all be poorer

Hockey was probably a Corynista. Anybody to the right of him is far right by comparison.

We don't need a FTA. Although it would be preferable to have one, if it included allowing the EU to interfere in our government's ability to support key industries and how UK companies run their businesses, and if foreign fishermen were allowed to continue plundering our fish stocks at levels they enjoyed before we left the EU, then the price is too high. Under those circumstances, we would be better off on WTO terms and the EU needs to understand that that is the way we will go unless they accept our red lines. My opinion is that you are deluded if you believe that we will cave in at the last minute and accept the EU's level playing field and undiminished fishing quotas. You appear to have gained your jaundiced opinion of our negotiating position from last year, when they were handled by the incompetent Vicar's daughter and the useless Robbins, egged on by a majority of remoaners in the cabinet, hampered by legislation like the Benn Surrender Bill and aided and abetted by a rogue Speaker. Those people are all gone now and the December election gave Boris a thumping mandate to "get Brexit done". You don't really understand politics if you think that the outcome can be fudged and attempts made to pull the wool over people's eyes. Come the next election, the party would be annihilated. You're entitled to believe that the EU hold all the cards in these negotiations if you wish. I think that we have the upper hand and that if the EU are too stubborn to blink and give in to our red lines, they will soon be begging us to come back to the negotiating table a few months into trade with us under WTO terms when that really starts to bite against the massive trade surplus they have with us and it begins to falter under the burden of tariffs. In the meantime, the EU has much else on their plate to occupy them. As well as the effect that the Chinese virus has on their economies and the budgetary bail-outs required to support their weaker southern state economies, movements to leave the EU are springing up in two or three other member states and gaining much support My forecast is that the EU will not survive a further decade and that our departure will have played a major part in its downfall. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

Well, you have my view on the House of Lords, a repository for failed and has-been politicians, party stooges and donors, post career Civil Servants, pontificating clerics, and landed gentry aristos. As for Boris and the current government, my main interest concerns their handling of the post Brexit talks with the EU regarding our future relationship with them. There, Frost is playing a blinder, sticking to his guns. Regarding other policies, things of course would have been very different had it not been for the Chinese virus. The economy was thriving until then. Personally I don't think Labour would have handled it any better. For the media, with half the country still under lock down and it being the summer with no sport or other distractions to report on, the media can indulge themselves in a full tilt smear campaign on the government in a vain effort to keep their flagging sales going. I don't pay too much attention to it and I suspect that many others don't either.

Another round of talks between us and the EU over a FTA, the seventh, comes to a close, with hardly anything having been achieved. Frost sticks to his guns stating that we will not budge on the EU's position that the trade talks cannot continue unless we agree to their insistence on a level playing field adjudicated by the ECJ, and their continued access to our fishing grounds based on quotas they had before we left. Once again, I really see no point in continuing to waste time going over the same ground again and again. Why can't we just tell them that those red lines are set in stone, we won't budge from them at all, and if the EU want a FTA deal, the talks can continue when they are prepared to accept that?

What has that got to do with my response to Hockey_saint getting it wrong believing that Cummings and Gove went to Eton? The Private Eye article makes some valid and cutting points, but then again, they could equally attempt to be satirical about many awards of peerages in the past, regardless of what political shade of party made them. Just have a look at the number of Lib Dumb peers there are when the party has just 11 MPs. I'm all for abolishing the HOL myself, so it's not really a good subject to attempt to show me up on.

You really have lost it, haven't you? There was no need at all to explain the history, I probably know as much history as you. What I questioned was the bizarre reason why you felt the need to go off on a complete tangent rabbiting on about Kaiser Wilhelm to deflect from the fact that your knowledge about Cummings' and Goves' places of education was incorrect.

OK, so you won't admit that you got it wrong about Gove and Cummings not having gone to Eton, so you're going off on some obscure tangent instead. Gove did a Kaiser Wilhelm? Are you feeling alright?

Yes, I can understand why you would find reading about a subject that directly impinges on the outcome of our trade talks with the EU boring. 🙄

There was an interesting article within the past couple of weeks in Conservative Home that gives me some hope that the government's policy ought to be concentrated on sorting this out satisfactorily. It too pointed out that economically the industry didn't contribute much at 1%. But it stated that the political implications made it much more important, especially as it was featured as a major plank of the Brexit campaign, and helped gain many votes for that and the General Election campaign in those coastal constituencies which had fisheries interests. Economically, it would be so easy to betray the fishing industry in order to get a FTA, just as Grocer Heath did in return for the original trade agreement, the EEC. Politically though, it would be a disaster for the Conservatives, who are therefore prepared to gamble that by holding firm on not allowing the quotas to continue as before, they risk there being no FTA.

I bow to your superior knowledge of how things operated under the CFP, but I still am doubtful about whether quotas allocated or purchased under the CFP regime will have any validity after 31st December. I'll see whether the new Fisheries Bill throws any light on the situation. Patently though, the situation cannot be allowed to continue whereby Foreign countries own the rights to take large amounts of fish from our territorial waters just because they were able to do so before we left the EU. It has become less an economic matter and very much politically loaded. This is an interesting article highlighting much of what is wrong with the current situation which is nothing short of scandalous. http://www.marinet.org.uk/who-owns-the-uk-fishing-industry-and-its-fishing-quotas.html Whether the Fisheries Bill addressed any of these problems or whether the government stands firm on the extent to which we will regain total control of our waters in the current talks remains to be seen.

Go on, admit it, you got it wrong. Gove's parents were Labour voters and had to apply for a scholarship when he was in the 6th form. Cummings went to Durham School , not exactly Eton, Harrow or Winchester level. The education of these two who hold important positions in the Party are not exceptional and many in past Labour governments had similar or more illustrious and privileged educations.