If she was a teller, she didn’t ask my name. So unless they’re going all the way up the road

That or they have so few potential voters there are entire roads without anyone who said they might vote for them.

The Little Prince will not go away – out of sight yes, but will no doubt be helping to fund those who wish to hurt us.

Those numbers input into electoral calculus show:

It will obviously tighten significantly – and people in the privacy of the polling booth often don’t vote the way they told the pollsters they would. Still encouraging, but it’s not a done deal yet.

I have just read a Daily Telegraph article about pro-Palestinian protesters and it was far worse than anything that I might expect to read in the Daily Mail so I thought who wrote this shite?

It turns out that Alister Heath is the Sunday Telegraph editor and that he previously wrote this little beauty:

https://archive.li/2022.10.16-000949/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/23/kwasi-kwartengs-budget-moment-history-will-radically-transform/

I can’t believe that deranged far-right fruitcakes have become so mainstream that they now have firm control of the Daily Telegraph.

It turns out that Alister Heath is the Sunday Telegraph editor and that he previously wrote this little beauty:

Allister Heath’s oeuvre is legendarily insane.  And yes, the Telegraph is right up there with the Heil in terms of batshit comment pieces. The thrust of many of Heath’s articles is how Labour and the wokerati left have dragged this country into the mire over the past decade. Yes, I know.

Yes, I know.

I guess the alternative is to admit that their party and policies have screwed the country and then change those policies.

What is happening with the torygraph ownership? Are the Barclays still hanging on.

Is this the one ernie?

the headline is barking

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/24/columbia-protests-anti-semitism-universities-west-dark-age/

Heath is completely batshit, some of his takes are remarkable he’s not slow in blaming the civil service/ remoaner elites/ wokerati/BBC  etc etc for the failures of everything from brexit to trussonomics to his toast being burnt

some brilliant stuff…………..  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/21/six-wasted-years-liz-truss-deliver-brexit-actually-works/

whats scary is that the Telegraph is supposed to be the grown up right wing paper!

Also scary that its seems to be so influential within the Tory party, its was Telegraph heavyweight Charles Moore who convinced Johnson to change the rules for Owen Patterson- the scandal that really precipitated Johnson’s downfall.

ernielynch
Full Member
I have just read a Daily Telegraph article about pro-Palestinian protesters and it was far worse than anything that I might expect to read in the Daily Mail so I thought who wrote this shite?

It turns out that Alister Heath is the Sunday Telegraph editor and that he previously wrote this little beauty:

Just read his piece on the budget from the link you posted.

I think they guy is in a drug fueled parallel universe. Utterly exposed as having the political and economical understanding of a dog turd.

whats scary is that the Telegraph is supposed to be the grown up right wing paper!

It used to be but it started dropping when the Barclays twins took over and has gone into a complete deathspiral over the last few years.

I thought a Middle-Eastern sovereign wealth fund was trying to buy out the Barclays, and the Tories were getting all hissy and threatening new laws because they didn’t want one of ‘their’ papers to be out of their control. You know things are bad when you are actually weighing up whether a UK paper run by a repressive middle east dictatorship is a healthier proposition than one run by right-wing free market loons out of a tax haven.

So much winning.

The UK economy will see the slowest growth of the largest developed nations next year, according to forecasts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5n2d8en8wo

Is this the one ernie?

No it was this one:

https://archive.li/2024.05.01-181902/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/01/western-society-ruined-by-virus-of-victimhood-entitlement/

The factual inaccuracies is to be expected but what particularly struck me is that the entire article appears to be dripping with pretty intense hatred.

Which I guess betrays a high level of desperation, so that at least is encouraging.

What happened to the notion that the one thing the press hate is a loser? The right wing rags turned on Major because they knew their credibility would be shot if they continued to back the Tories in the mid 90s.

Has the culture war narrative now become so entrenched that there is no going back for the likes of the Torygraph?

Do they know something we don’t about how much of an impact targeted social media stuff is having?

Many people made predictions that the RW press would drop the Tories like a hot brick if they started to look too unpopular. If this isn’t too unpopular to remain credible in defending them, I don’t know what is.

Many people made predictions that the RW press would drop the Tories like a hot brick if they started to look too unpopular

I dont think many people made that prediction.

Murdochs rags would although only if they thought the alternative was close enough to his desires.

The Telegraph, express and mail not so much. They might give some support to ukip v2 but since they are less popular than the tories (currently anyway) they really have to stick with the tories.

Just saw a poll for the new North Yorkshire mayor which has the Labour candidate streets ahead of the Tory. I had assumed he had zero chance in this area, which is about as blue as you can get for the north of England.

That really would be stunning! It would be huge for NYFRS too, which would be good for me (and everyone else who needs the Fire Service). Cast my vote and the people at the polling station didn’t seem overly bothered about ID. They said it had been steady but not quiet.

You now have to ask what is in the interest of the owners of the Telegraph, Mail and Express. Is it

a) to carry on propping up the Tory Party as it heads for defeat?

b) to deal the final blow in its complete disemboweling, implosion and takeover post-election by Farage Ltd?

Will we see a major newspaper wield the knife and come out for Reform?

these numbers are nuts for the Tories

Im pretty sure the locals wont be this bad for them- not least because theres not refm candidates in all the locals

still funny tho

And this is *without* taking tactical voting into account. pic.twitter.com/p85Odo2faO

— ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) May 2, 2024

He needs a big result though, or Project Penny will get underway, and then he’ll have to call the election next week.

I can’t see any paper coming out for Reform before the General Election… BUT, if the LibDems really could form the official opposition after the election… then all bets are off from there on.

I can’t see any paper coming out for Reform before the General Election

It’s true, they won’t win any seats, but if you make the calculation that Lord Farage will be running the Tories from 2025 onwards, might you try to hedge your bets by at least not backing Rishi? ‘We need a return to TRUE CONSERVATISM’ kind of thing, with a comment piece by Ben Habib on page 5. Sort of thing I can see the Express considering

I’m to young to have been paying attention at the end of the Major govt. Was it this bad?

It seemed pretty bad at the time with almost daily sleaze scandals and infighting but to be honest they were rank amateurs compared to this lot.

No

it was chaotic and all the corruption came out into the open but nothing like this scale of incompetence and nothing like as hard right wing

No it was this one:

😲 crikey. The Telegraph? That piece wouldn’t have looked out of place in an edition of Breitbart or the Right Stuff, or maybe even the Daily Stormer.  I knew the Telegraph had moved to the right somewhat recently, I didn’t realise it had moved quite that far [right]

Yeah sleaze was the major issue (pun not intended) but also that the Tories had been in government for so long. People wanted change.

Was it this bad?

Yes. Unlike TJ I remember it being chaotic, corrupt and incompetent. It wasn’t as very right wing as this one though, he’s right about that.

Went to vote. Quite quiet.

Did have someone kicking off about why pencils instead of pens and blah blah. Staff gave him a pen so he went away happy that he had prevented vote rigging.

I was tempted to suggest that if bad guys were getting their hands on the ballot papers then its game over anyway.

Rubbing takes time and normally leaves a mark. Far easier to have a replacement ballot and a secure disposal option at which point it doesnt matter whether pen or pencil.

I’m to young to have been paying attention at the end of the Major govt. Was it this bad?

In some ways, yes, in others, definitely not. That government was still clinging onto the kind of ‘one nation Tory’ version of the party which is now gone forever, and while it was, as usual, highly cynical, there was probably still a line it wouldn’t cross in terms of pandering to the far right at that point. Major himself had no majority to speak of for much of his tenure, could get nothing done except window-dressing, which led to the impression of weakness. And he was instrumental in bringing in a Truss-like currency policy which caused a collapse in the value of the pound.

But he was still the fag-end of a decade and a half of divisive Tory rule, the party was worn out, and out of ideas, so Labour in 1997 was inevitable.

Everyone has different memories. I remember the Major government as privatising the things that Thatcher hadn’t got round to privatising. He was after all personally endorsed by Thatcher herself to succeed her for a reason.

He was also responsible for the collapse of the housing market which resulted in the greatest repossession of homes in UK history and left people prisoners of negative equity and unable to move for literally years. But because it wasn’t a Labour government which was responsible for that unprecedented crisis you are unlikely to ever hear it mentioned.

John Major was every bit as right-wing and neoliberal as Thatcher, he certainly wasn’t anymore left-wing than the present shower.

it was chaotic and all the corruption came out into the open but nothing like this scale of incompetence and nothing like as hard right wing

It was full of  a sort of ‘Carry On’ style scandal. Mellor boffing a call girl in his Chelsea kit. That type of thing. Then there was Aitkin and his slush funds and ‘Sword of Justice’

It all seems rather quaint by todays completely morally bankrupt standards

And the Cones Hot-Line, don’t forget that… Ground breaking stuff.

He was also responsible for the collapse of the housing market which resulted in the greatest repossession of homes in UK history and left people prisoners of negative equity and unable to move for literally years. But because it wasn’t a Labour government which was responsible for that unprecedented crisis you are unlikely to ever hear it mentioned.

Mainly the aforementioned ERM issue that caused that massive spike in interest rates. Tell the young people today that you were paying 16% on yer mortgage and they’ll never believe you. But at least he never had an idea as bad as Brexit, I guess, so it’s all relative.

Perhaps he would have got around to Rwanda deportations etc if he’d hung around a bit longer, but I’m not sure. Still, we’ll always have the Cones Hotline.*

*TIL They’ve renamed it, but IT. STILL. EXISTS. In a fairer world, this would be his legacy, not boffing Edwina Currie.

It probably tells you everything you need to know about the Major years that him boffing Edwina Currie was the most eventful thing that happened.

The polar opposite of the present rolling shitshow, where it’s been one long car crash after another, on what seems like a daily basis, for well over a decade now

Major left the place in a better state than it’s in now, but I remember how long it felt before he finally went.

That dead man went for a very long walk… just like now

In my mind, it was all a bit smaller scale than the current stuff – back then there was a scandal over ‘cash for questions’. These days, it is perfectly routine for an MP to be on the board of a gambling company, receiving £50,000/yr for 1 hour’s work per month, who then asks pertinent questions in the house. There’s a weary story on that sort of thing in pretty much every issue of Private Eye.

But, this is quite a good roundup of the scandals, and there really is quite a lot!  Especially in 1994 for some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Basics_(campaign)

Mellor boffing a call girl in his Chelsea kit.

Which never happened! The football top detail which everyone remembers was made up by sex offender Max Clifford. Mellor also took a month long holiday from the daughter of the PLO’s finance director…

Much as I don’t really want to know any of the details of David Mellors nocturnal liaisons, I don’t think the Chelsea kit was the main issue.

The main problem was the fact that Major and Mellor were both part of an administration that was loftily lecturing people about morality. Turns out that one was having a long term affair with a colleague and the other was shagging call girls.

I shall be waiting the result of the York & North Yorkshire mayor.

As the Guardian posted at the weekend, a good stuffing for Tories in Richi’s back yard will make for a happy day.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/28/england-elections-sunak-labour-keir-starmer-north-yorkshire

Anyway, I’ve done my bit of subtle family campaigning to get 4/4 votes in for Labour. Kids might have gone for the greens, wife was thinking indy, but have been persuaded there’s a greater cause to fight for this time.

nice one Steve

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