UK Election!

realistically the majority of people with kids at private school won’t have a nanny to take on the ski holiday, if they have a ski holiday.

Nah, they’ll have a chalet girl instead. ESF do great business with British private schools late season in some resorts, as do the kayak outdoor adventure type places though Brexit has shut some of them as they can no longer employ Brits with dodgy qualifications prepared to work for peanuts. There’s been quite a shake up/out.

EDIT or to kids who play unusual instruments for the school orchestra

Tromboning with the older boys?

Players of the pink piccolo

Good grief. After Jackie Walker’s history of antisemitic pronouncements and the reason for Abbott’s suspension you’d think she’d have the brains to choose different company

https://x.com/MrHarryCole/status/1795880768721531354

After 37 years in pin a red rossette on a donkey Hackney, shouldn’t she give someone else a go?

Same old Labour

Harry Cole works for the S*n, doean’t he?

@pondo The current Mrs Johnson’s ex IIRC?

Jackie Walker is Jewish (but black).

Players of the pink piccolo

Pink oboe wasn’t it?

Jackie Walker is Jewish and black. I don’t think I’d fit into the Labour party because I read the comments on the African holocaust that got her expelled and they looked historically accurate.

Owen Jones runs through the utter hypocrisy with Diane Abbott and racism as outlined in the Forde report regarding the Labour Party, outlines everything in 10 mins.

Wow, Jess Philips is a bit of work aint she?

edit…hang on a min….**** stw copy/paste shit

Don’t know what she’s done to merit that comment but Jess is my favourite Labour MP. :)

Edit: I see you’ve managed to add a Youtube. I hoped Jess would win the Labour leadership race, it would be very different party if she had, and survived in the role. It would be the Labour party rather than what it is now.

watch the vid, about 2 mins in

And Wes Streeting gets it too (he sooo deserves it) at 13mins

The video isn’t very helpful as there is no context:

“Phillips verbally clashed with fellow Labour MP Diane Abbott on 14 September 2015 over the gender composition of Jeremy Corbyn’s first Shadow Cabinet. After she asked Corbyn why he had failed to appoint a woman to shadow the great offices of state, Abbott accused her of being “sanctimonious” and said that Phillips was “not the only feminist in the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party]”. Corbyn did not intervene.[65] Owen Bennett wrote in The Huffington Post that Phillips recounted: “I roundly told her to **** off.” When asked what Abbott did after that suggestion, Phillips replied: “She **** off.”[66] According to Abbott in a January 2018 Guardian interview: “Jess Phillips never told me to **** off. What was extraordinary is that she made a big deal of telling people she had.”[67] Phillips later apologised.[68][69]”

There are about 7% if UK children at private school (compared with 40-odd% in Aus, interestingly).

I assume that 40% includes Catholic schools, which charge a very low school fees because most funding still comes from the state budget.

@somafunk For reasons I don’t quite follow the Scots appear to have a different attitude to this, and the proportion of kids at private schools in Scotland is lower

lol! 13% of London schoolkids are in private schools. 25% of Edinburgh schoolkids are in private schools. No true Edinburgh schoolkid fallacy inbound…

https://www.thenational.scot/news/23709036.private-schools-one-four-edinburgh-students-attend/

A question: Would now be a good time to ‘grass up’ / make public some really shitty Tory behaviour around enabling the selling off of national assets which were provided for the benefit of children? Just wondering whether to speak to an appropriate journalist, or if it would be lost in the election stooshie

What would you like to achieve by doing this? For the common good, your organisation, the people who did it? Punishment, redress, consequences through side effects, loss of respect? Currently you have options, once it’s out you no longer have those options. If you’ve just found out about it now, think back in say two month increments and consider what effect it would have had then, would any of those times have been better for your desired outcomes, now well when might such a time come again? Also you may well have options other than grassing up and causing one more shitty Tory story behaviour in the news. Do they know you know, do they care, are they worried about what you might do?

Sir Kneeler: 16 and 17 year olds should get the vote.

Why would Labour say that, one wonders…

Three weeks ago there was ‘uproar’ about Natalie Elphicke crossing the floor to join Labour. Now, that’s not even yesterday’s news; it’s ancient history.

Diane Abbott is, rightfully, an iconic figure; the current frothing about whether she can – or can’t – stand again will last longer than the noise about elphicke but will also die away without having a significant impact.

There will be attempts by owen jones, momentum and others to keep this in the headlines but it will have little impact.

For clarity – I am in no way at all attempting to make any comparison between Diane Abbott and Natalie Elphicke; the latter isn’t fit to clean the shoes of the former but the truth is…no individual is bigger than the party and the news cycle will roll on, regardless.

Pray for grimep – no ones really biting tonight are they?

Keep trying though – its good entertainment!

Why would Labour say that, one wonders…

Because one believes in the concept of democracy, doesn’t one?

@politecameraaction As a good Glaswegian I am clearly not going to object to any criticism of the other city, but I’d understood that across the whole of Scotland, a lower proportion of kids were at private school. Is this incorrect?

Thanks for clarification re: Aus.

watch the vid, about 2 mins in

I would literally rather remove my own kidneys with a teaspoon than watch a15 minute YouTube vid of Owen Jones banging on about Diane Abbot

Well I reckon reckon that 17 year olds are at least as able to make sensible choices as the 90 year-olds who postal vote from their care home where they spend their days watching GB news and talking about the 50s or the war which is still their world (don’t ask me how I know this).

Anything written by owen jones needs independent citations.

To say he has an agenda would be like calling the great Wall of China a line of bricks

lol! 13% of London schoolkids are in private schools. 25% of Edinburgh schoolkids are in private schools. No true Edinburgh schoolkid fallacy inbound…

Very clever eh?, selective reporting per chance?, There are 28,876 pupils in 71 independent schools – 4.1%of pupils in Scotland.

IFS report on private schooling in the UK, long read so I’m working through it

The private schools in total are quite small, if measured by the proportion of the pupil population (6.4% in England in 2021, some 4% in Scotland, 2% in Wales and less than 1% in Northern Ireland).

binners, if I could give you 10 likes for your latest post…I would!

There are too many posts on which I would summarise as saying…I want a Labour government but only on my terms.

Sorry to piss on your chips, chaps – you will get either Labour or tory; best to just accept it’s going to be Labour – on their terms, not yours.

Back to electoral calculus now.

@Edukator

Currently given some of the opinions floating around online,  I reckon my 8 yr old has a much nicer view of the world and would trust his judgment more

I would literally rather remove my own kidneys with a teaspoon than watch a15 minute YouTube vid of Owen Jones banging on about Diane Abbot

Good boy…….You’ll have a merit badge in the post from labour head office for that one

@frankconway Yep. Are Lab going to be massively disappointing on the environment/active travel/whatever issue you feel strongly about? Probably.

Are they going to be less of a horror show than five more years of the Tories? Absolutely yes.

There’s only one game in town, however much we all might wish otherwise.

Thankfully the current generation of 90 year-olds struggle with smart phones and computers but when my generation get there the comments sections are going to be something to behold.

Diane Abbott should be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate. Simple as that and that easy to defuse by Labour. It’s also the right thing to do which helps.

I agree on Diane Abbott. But looking at the video of her in the news,  is she unwell? Massive shaking hands and being guided around the podium, not saying that to be nasty more out of concern

Thankfully the current generation of 90 year-olds struggle with smart phones and computers but when my generation get there the comments sections are going to be something to behold.

What worse than we get on STW today? The horror!!!

😉

Just for clarification. I think Peter Cook asked Billy Connolly backstage at the secret Policeman’s Ball  for a poetic description and got ‘pink piccolo’ but Cook delivered the much better line of ‘a self-confessed player of the pink oboe’.

However, I think that both secured a music scholarship.

Good boy…….You’ll have a merit badge in the post from labour head office for that one

I reckon if you gave most people the option of listening to Owen Jones rattle on about Diane Abbot or removing their own kidneys with a teaspoon, the A&E departments would be pretty busy tonight

Binners – when he was on the newsagents i had to turn it off.  Just totally single minded to the exclusion of any other views.

The charitable status of public schools is mainly based on their granting of subsidised places.

Another category being exceptionally bright & thus bring up the schools average results.. My nephew got a scholarship on that basis but his brother only got a discount on account of not being so bright 🤔

@grahamt1980 – yes I was thinking the same about Diane Abbot 😕

While Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot (somewhat inevitably) running as independents might fill the waking hours of a certain type of person in North London, in between their Gaza protests, and despite the best efforts of Owen Jones and our totally London-centric media, 99.9% of the population couldn’t give a flying **** about it

A total irrelevance

grahamt1980
Full Member
I agree on Diane Abbott. But looking at the video of her in the news, is she unwell?

Yeah, it could have been pent up emotion I suppose but it liked like something more concerning unfortunately.

Never been bothered by Corbyn, Abbott, McDonnell, etc, as it’s up to the party and their popularity, but i do think there’s a lot of septuagenarians in politics who should be taking a sidestep for the next generation to step in, and i don’t mean career politicians who have done nothing but Uni then joining a party and never working outside of politics a day in their life.

On a different topic, I see there will be a continuation of doctors strikes upto 2 days before the election.

Putting aside the human cost of this for one second, this must be bad news for the Tories… as well as an incoming labour government. Or rather, an early test of just where labours “heart” really is.

Again though, it’s patients that will be paying the price of this dispute not being resolved an age ago.