lol @ funkmasterp, yeah Danny Baker probably never listens to the radio.

Kind of correct. What I do (and you should try this because it’s awesome) is read the news stories that interest me or seem important. Therefore I can avoid royal news. Bombardment ceased! You’re welcome

I’m impressed, your ears can obviously filter out certain news items when they are mentioned on the radio or TV.

However I doubt that Danny Baker possess such evolutionary advanced ears.

No funkmasterp I don’t live with them, I read and listen to the news, you presumably don’t.

You can’t be selectively death and blind when you read or watch the news or listen to the radio.

Presumably Danny Baker also knew about the birth, he just seems to have very limited information about it, despite his apparent strong urge to comment about it.

I’ve just seen Danny Baker on BBC news claiming that he had no idea who had had a baby. Does he genuinely expect people to believe that?

I have zero interest in the royal family but even I knew that the wife of Princess Diana’s son had had a baby.

I wish I wasn’t bombarded with constant news about the royal family but I find it impossible to avoid it. How the **** does Danny Baker manage it? Presumably he has access to a radio?

I also knew the mother was mixed race quite simply because I had heard the rantings of racists. Is Danny Baker really that unaware?

When I saw the picture I made the connection instantly. It’s nice to think that some people are so insulated from racism that they didn’t – lucky you.

Aweeshoe – your first post hit every nail on the head. Well said.

Great! Glad to hear it. And it’s so easy to do.

Not just you.

The title of the video says “Pensioner from hell attacks small children cycling”

How small were they? They didn’t sound very small to me.

Although to be fair they did remind of the sort of kids who like taunting Down’s Syndrome people for their own personal entertainment, so perhaps they were indeed very young.

I think they were awful

28% in elections which were overwhelmingly held in the rural English shires is actually a pretty good result for Labour.

It is exactly the same as the Tories, the party most associated with rural English shires, got.

In contrast the Tories getting 28% and losing over 1,300 seats in natural Conservative territory was an absolute disaster for them.

But of course you won’t be hearing the headline writers saying that, just that they both did equally badly.

I’ve had a lot of success by placing pills inside small balls of raw minced beef.

IME cats, unless they are very ill, can’t resist raw minced beef.

It’s very easy to do as raw mince is naturally sticky. The balls don’t have to be much bigger than the pills, which means that they are very quickly swallowed.

Yeah right, the Tories were “punished” because they had the wrong policies. And young voters were drawn to Labour because they saw Corbyn as an old grandad.

I can see this is going nowhere – you are just going to ignore all the facts that don’t suit whatever point you are trying to make.

But I’ll leave you with this, since you mentioned it :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42747342

Labour’s increase in the polls has nothing to do with Corbyn taking the party left, the feedback on him and the party make that clear. That was about out punishing the others.

People have very short memories for something which happened only 2 years ago.

Labour’s fortunes changed the day their election manifesto was leaked to the press.

Up until that point all the opinion polls showed overwhelming support for Theresa May, the Tories, we were told, would win a stunning landslide victory. There was no evidence that voters wanted to “punish” the Tories.

And why would they? The Tories had only been in power 2 years after almost 20 years of being unable to form a majority government.

What changed everything, and all the dire predictions of Labour meltdown, and ultimately, the greastest increase in Labour support since 1945, was that Labour offered something different.

https://www.businessinsider.com/poll-huge-public-support-for-jeremy-corbyns-manifesto-promises-2017-5?r=US&IR=T

Similarly Charles Kennedy offered voters an alternative to the Tories and New Labour, Nick Clegg did not. LibDem support increased impressively under Kennedy but totally collapsed under Clegg.

Don’t believe opponents of radical change who claim that the only way to win elections is to do it from a non-existent “centre”.

Do you think Margret Thatcher “made a pitch for the centre ground” when she was leader of the Tory Party? She was fairly successful in winning elections.

So true. He couldn’t get any tractiom with a broader audience though – see above.

Clegg got the attention the lib Dems needed to amke them a ‘proper’ party.

I don’t know why you want to give Clegg so much credit and Kennedy so little.

Until Charles Kennedy became leader the LibDems had been losing support in every general election since its foundation. Then under Kennedy’s leadership support for the LibDems increased by almost a third.

Contrast that with Nick Clegg who the best he ever managed was a derisory 1% increase in LibDem support, at a time when neither the Tories or Labour had anything to offer. And then went to lose two thirds of LibDem support, their worst ever result.

To answer my own question I guess it’s to support the narrative that parties should aim for the mythical “centre ground”. Facts such as the disastrous consequences for the LibDems, or the 10% increase for Labour under under Corbyn, the greastest increase in Labour vote since 1945, are simply ingnored.

Being part of a coalition government on whose support the government depended was a breakthrough for them.

OK, fair enough, but the “breakthrough” was solely dependent on the Tories not doing very well.

Losing 5 seats in the 2010 general election was not a good result for the LibDems.

Under Charles Kennedy the LibDems were the only credible alternative to the neo-liberalism espoused by both the Tories and New Labour. In constrast under Nick Clegg’s leadership the LibDems turned up late to the party embracing neo-liberalism, ironically, just when the shit hit the fan, ie, the international credit crisis.

Nick Clegg’s betrayal of millions of LibDem voters had completely predictable consequences. As the ensuing catastrophic collapse in LibDem support proved.

Clegg’s breakthrough in that election.

There was no LibDem electoral “breakthrough” under Nick Clegg.

In the 2010 general election the LibDem vote increased by a mere 1%, they actually lost 5 seats. That’s dispite the fact that both Labour and the Tories had been widely discredited.

The only significant electoral breakthrough the LibDems have experienced in recent times ocurrred when Charles Kennedy was leader, he offered a relatively left-wing alternative to New Labour.

Nick Clegg swung the LibDems dramatically to the right and ultimately proved to be a disaster for them.

Isn’t the term black hole a bit insensitive?

What’s wrong with calling them space holes?

Being the most multicultural and least racist nation in Europe. Easily.

Send in the elephants?

Yeah, and what about Piers Morgan? No one has any sympathy for him.

Stoner, it is I.

Knee high socks whilst on a bike are never cool.

Don’t do it.

I never met petes gaff/bullheart but like so many others found his determination incredibly moving and inspirational.

I haven’t followed recent developments and come to believe that Mark was indestructable, so I’m truly shocked and gutted to hear the tragic news.

Didn’t Mark set a world record for fighting this very rare form of cancer?

RIP petes gaff/bullheart/Mark