The squirmy little shit (Cummings) will pop up again at some point, he’s like an unflushable turd but right now I doubt he’s got much useful to contribute to the noise.

I’m hoping for cast iron proof that he lied to the Po-Po about Partygate.

Carrie will be sitting there going through all of Liz Truss’ skeletons now, she’ll be next in line for a hatchet job.

I actually think that Carrie Antionette has a little KitKat shuffle whilst she’s plotting the next knifing.

Can’t wait to see what Cummings does next, I’m guessing just before the local elections we will find out

Fun isn’t it?

I mean, it would be better as the plot of a soap opera. It is a strange way to run a country, though, and I bet it’s providing no end of amusement to our former partners. But that’s Brexit Britain for you – government by soap opera / panto.

Whoever made the decision to use shrink wrap on sets of brake pads. When that stuff does its biz around the pad spring it can take longer to get it out of the packaging and clean than it does to fit the pads.

People who drop litter.

And a slightly hotter corner for those who actually make money out of fly tipping.

Priti Patel – although she probably already has a second job as a non-exec director of hell – and takes advantage of its offshore status for tax purposes.

It is very concerning that Le Pen and Zemmour polled more than 30% combined.

I don’t know the relationship between the two parties – I hope there is no danger (or there are rules preventing it) of Zemmour pulling out to gift vote share to Le Pen (a la Farage-Johnson).

Let’s hope the French reject this spiteful brand of politics which seems new and exciting to some, but is actually as old as the hills and no less dangerous than 80-90 years ago.

Come on, France – walk the walk – Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Well, I’ve been genuinely schooled here. Good knowledge STW.

We’ve seen swifts disappear from around us, sadly. They used to be a staple of mid to late evening in the summer, absolutely scorching through the sky after insects. Loads of swallows still, though.

Where’s Cummings in all this?

He seems to have got himself a STW login…

Passerines are my favourite type of bird too. Evolved to be perfect in the air, to the point of being useless elsewhere. No compromise evolution.

When on hols in Portugal a few years back we went to a nearby town for a day. My wife thought I was crazy when I spent ages watching the Alpine Swifts around the sandy cliffs. If you can’t stop to watch the world’s fastest bird (nearly) in level flight, what can you do?

Peregrines? Yes, super impressive, but it’s just falling really!

😀

I was just thinking about this over the weekend. No sightings yet, but I reckon they’ll probably have set off by now.

I can’t wait for the eye-watering luminous greens of late May, early June.

😀

^^^^

Also, I don’t think we have got to the stage where ‘knowing where the bodies are buried’ means actual bodies. Yet.

But if the last five or so years have taught me anything it is how precarious checks and balances I take for granted actually are. Anything is possible if the electorate are stupid enough to start the ball rolling and it achieves a critical mass.

You don’t think we live in a kleptocracy?

I do. There are degrees, though. Whilst we do have a problem we are not on the same level as South Africa under Jacob Zuma, for example.

Mind you, we don’t have the excuse of ‘carried over’ issues from a freedom struggle that bred its own unique blend of paranoia, cliques and power bases which were only kept in check by an unassailable figure like Mandela. When he popped his clogs, the moral restraint slipped a good few notches.

UK seems to be willing to do nothing

Despite having voted ‘ourselves’ into this shit.

certainly the last several years have been comedy gold for all other countries looking at the UK

Very much so. Putin will love the fact that he can point to the oldest parliament in the world being undermined and belittled by Johnson’s antics. “Don’t mess with Russia and you’ll be fine. Mess with Russia and your next election may feature the rise of a previously ‘unknown’ movement with a strange allure largely created on social media”.

the longer it goes on for, the greater the damage

Totally. It won’t take long for the notion that the UK way may not be a great model to gain traction. It probably already has.

Don’t forget that the whole EU Referendum was a conscious exercise in bypassing UK parliamentary democracy. Why did it take place? Because Farage only promised to give the Tories their racists back if it was held. And held with such a stupidly simple premise. Who funded Farage? Etc.

Vlad was influential in much of this and now he’s reaping his return on investment.

^^^

I should say ‘developed’ countries there. Truly tinpot kleptocracies don’t count.

it’s the same in every country

It really isn’t.

That’s the same hymn sheet as “they’re all as bad as each other” that the Brexies trot out.

Obviously there are chancers, shysters and crooks vying for political position in most countries – but the electorate in most countries doesn’t put them in a position where they actually attain it. Sadly not the case in the UK.

You have obviously completely missed the point of the quote.

Not unintentionally I’d wager…..

cutting the red tape

I think we’ve pretty much established that what the bunch of strokers we have as a government mean by ‘cutting red tape’ is ‘imposing further unnecessary red tape’.

How’s Putin isolated the UK

Brexit. Leave received illegal funding from Russia. That may well have been enough to tip the result.

Looking like twunts on the world stage

Really? Boris Johnson is our Prime Minister. Liz Truss is our foreign secretary. Plus many others. Most of our senior ministers are only in their jobs due to Brexit and the purge of non-idiots that followed.

America split down the middle

Biden can’t move because the balance is so fine in the US between normal people and card carrying white supremacists (who, despite all their posturing are totally devoid of any sense of duty in the world). The US suffered an assault on the Capitol in the wake of the Biden election and there are still plenty of straw-chewing hood-wearing rednecks who would take a pot shot at Biden and believe the election was stolen.

That enough?

Putin stirred both those pots very effectively. Google Vladislav Surkov if you want to get an idea of the asymmetric info wars stuff that gives Putin a boner. But, I’m guessing you already knew all this stuff anyway, just prefer to try to deflect from it. 🤷‍♂️

Vlad’s done with Johnson and Trump. He’s got the UK isolated and looking like total twunts on the world stage. He’s got America split down the middle and non-interventionist. And all for the price of a few FB ads, a few strategic bungs for greedy shits wanting to capitalise on an economic shock and a couple of hookers.

And to think the Soviets bankrupted themselves trying to achieve the same.

You’ve got to hand it to him. And no one in ‘the west’ should be surprised – Putin wasn’t disrupting western democracy just for a laugh. The idea of an investment is that you collect on it later.

Someone’s going to have to bite the bullet at some point and start seriously addressing the issue but today this pack of jokers proved (unsurprisingly) they’re not going too

If anyone thinks the human race isn’t going to dig up and burn every fossil hydrocarbon before we’re done you are deluded.

In the insular way our world is set up, no government will dare say “pay more” to its population consistently.

If we were serious about the environment we would be looking seriously at 1 or 2 child only policies. With all the shit that entails of course. But we all know what the population curve of bacteria in a petri dish is – that is us on a planetary level.

Anyhow, this is getting a bit off topic. What has the threadbare wanksock that is our PM been up to in the last few hours?

It’s like his life is entirely satisfied simply by putting on some high-viz and a hard hat.

Don’t forget the Union Jacks though.

It is the electorate that let him get away with his inane dribblings, so this reflects very badly on them/us.

That’s because he’s politically naive.

No he’s not.

He knows full well all he has to do is appear in front of a few more union jacks and up his usage of ‘Briddish’ per sentence by a couple, then say Starmer is unpatriotic and the chumps will vote Tory again.

He doesn’t give a shit because he doesn’t have to.

I’m pretty sure one of Rusty Tussock’s songs was played on the R2 Folk Show a few weeks back. Featuring Brett Underleaf on noseflute.

holding out on actual decisions until his ‘options’ have disappeared so no decision has to be made

Yeah, but they (abroad) need us more than we need them, so this is fine. Yes?

It is a slam dunk for him, though. Most of the Oi Oi support will just read the headline and say “**** Yeah”.

What’s he doing to address dirty Russian money in British politics, Partygate etc?

In opining on this he is seeking to divert attention. Again. It really isn’t PM-level stuff to be commenting on this.

I’m on about where the optional burgundy covers are manufactured, but the point is probably lost now.

Just got my son’s new passport through – now need to source a burgundy cover. The only thing holding me back is that it is probably a Brexit cheerleader who sells* them in order to profiteer from an unnecessary change.🙂

*Made in a sweatshop somewhere, no doubt.

Front line civil servants are a very long way from being able to do that.

Yes – I meant the politicians and their puppet masters.

It’s incredibly hard implementing policies you know will cause more harm than good

Unless you stand to gain from it personally – financially, career-wise etc.

^^^^

What Trump and Farage also did was to legitimise being ‘a bit of an arsehole’.

They essentially rebadged common decency and courtesy as ‘political correctness gorn maaaad’ and appealed to the inner arsehole that lurked in far too many of ‘us’ not to be cowed any more by ‘political correctness’ (aka common decency).

It had kind of been an unwritten rule of Western democracy that you didn’t stir those pots, but they did and they did it very well indeed.

Sadly, they outnumber the intelligent people in this country.

Yep. And the Tories know it. Take a turd, roll it in glitter and wrap a Union Jack around it and enough people will love it.

And if you point this out you are a patronising, elitist, unpatriotic snob.

I can’t see a way out of this.

^^^^

That.

They will hopefully get a huge kicking in the local body elections next month.

Not going to happen. Enough of the electorate are too apathetic/thick/disengaged/racist/self-centred to either bother voting or actually think about how a country like the UK should conduct and position itself.

How on earth did we end up with these morons in charge?

Brexit. Who would be ‘suitable’ to implement a fundamentally stupid idea?

1. Crooks who are going to profiteer from the disruption.

2. Idiots – who are useful to ‘1’ above.

Sell the country off on the cheap whilst wrapping the Union Jack round themselves announcing everyone else is unpatriotic.

See above.

^^^^

They’re going to ‘win’ forever and ‘we’ are going to let them because ‘we’ aren’t clever enough to perceive what is really going on.

🤷‍♂️

Let’s face it, he’s going to survive and thrive simply by brazening it out and chucking the odd dead cat around.

The modern Tory party hold a cynical (and well earned) disregard for the intelligence of the UK electorate. They have continually been proven right since 2015, why would they stop using a winning formula?

All they have to do is paint Starmer as a ‘scheming, liberal, politically correct, patronising, elitist intellectual’ and they’ll win. And why? Because they know their share of the electorate (especially the post-Brexit ‘new’ tories) despise anyone with intellect – mostly out of fear, resentment and jealousy.

So we’re left with an electorate that refuses to be governed by people more intelligent. We’re ****ed.

The Tory Toadies will fall in behind him if they think his brand of bullshit and bluster will win the next GE and keep their snouts in the trough. If they don’t, they’ll knife him.

Never underestimate the sheer cynicism of the average Conservative.

Listening to it, its staggering that this blithering idiot has become PM. He is an absolute imbecile as well as a compulsive liar.

It’s not staggering at all. It’s what 52%* of the population voted for.

*Discounting those who didn’t vote at all.

He’d just be replaced by Truss or Gove.
Everyone in Cabinet now is a thick, Brexity, corrupt, talent void.

Well that’s what ‘we’ voted for so…..

Never has the adage that you get the government you deserve been more apt.

I’ll probably get panned for this as I suspect home brewing is like coffee expertise or sound systems in terms of masculine intensity but….

I’ve just bought a Brewery in a Box and am going to give their IPA a crack. Got to start somewhere!

The arrogance and entitlement of the man is absolutely off the scale!

So many people like him because, deep down, they would be exactly the same given the chance.

He represents people who have “had enough of political correctness” – translation = “want to be open about their arseholeishness without fear of rebuke”.

Meanwhile the rest of the world chuckles and moves on. Or if you’re Putin, sits back and admires his handiwork.

Isn’t the premise of the market economy that the market will sort it out…

Depends how many fat bastards already control the ‘market’.

I’m not quite sure how a market ‘sorts out’ imposing daft costs on ourselves, though – at least not to the benefit of the consumer. If you make yourself more difficult to deal with you increase costs. If that is passed on to the consumer it is inflationary. If a company chooses to take a hit on their margin the fat bastards with shares take their money out and buy gold instead or take their money elsewhere. Choosing to accelerate this process (which is inevitable given population growth, dwindling natural resources and the global location of those resources) is just mental.