Well, the shit of foxes, but yeah, bit unfair that.

With fox shit, you can put it in the bin and never see it again, but Farage is more of a stinky, greasy, smearing, permanently unflushable turd that’s been hanging about in the loo for decades. Every so often you think he’s gone away, but it turns out he was just lurking the other side of the u bend and pops back again.

If Rory Stewart were standing in my constituency, I would be very tempted to vote for him. In his work he’s now an advocate of alleviating many of the problems in the poorest communities globally by giving no-conditions cash. Who knew that the problems of poverty could be solved with money?!!!

He’s also a reasonable person and one who I think genuinely wants good things for the country in general rather than just for rich folk. He actually wants Britain to be governed well and in the interests of the population. He has some blind spots of course, he wouldn’t be a Conservative of he didn’t, but he’s decent and there’s hope that he can be persuaded by evidence of benefit.

This is surely right - we really don’t know where the undecided voters will go, and if a week is a long time in politics, five of them is an eternity.

I need my arsehole, though.

I mean it’s not a lot of fun, but the alternatives are much worse.

If my seat could go Tory or Lib Dem, I’d vote Lib Dem every day and twice on Thursdays.

I nominate you for best written sentence on the Internet today.

Awful Awful Awful.

The Conservative Party is notoriously unforgiving of leaders who lose general elections, and currently pathologically addicted to leadership elections. I’d be very surprised if he’s not gone by the end of the year even if he does exceptionally well in the general election.

Well in that sense, they’ve been remarkably successful. Literally billions of public money gone through the VIP lane and unrepaid business loans during covid. Nearly every tax cut giving more money to the already well off and less to below average earners. Wealth inequality soaring to help them feel superior.

OK, but he did claim he was going to stay on as an MP. Come to think of it, that’s a bit of an admission that he’s going to lose the election and then be replaced as leader of the Conservative Party.

Hopefully considerably less powerful soon.

It’s only a story because it’s so incredibly rare that members of the public get the chance to criticise his crazy policies to his face, in terms ordinary folk can relate to.

Alongside squawkbox, it’s one of the popular media outlets designed to appeal to left wing folks that regularly work to oppose the Labour Party (who they call “red tories”) winning.

I had a leftist explain to me earlier that it would be better for Boris to win because Labour was too right wing and it would put people off voting for a properly leftist party if the centrists got into power again.

It’s not just Brexit, it’s also austerity and stealth austerity, massive and chronic cuts to public services, stagnation of minimum wage, underfunded NHS and health and social care, underinvestment, Trussonimics, waste of government money on contracts for cronies (aka the VIP lane) and of course don’t forget systematic, sustained and deliberate suppression of wages in the public sector alongside deregulation and lack of regulation in the private sector in the face of the growth of the gig economy, which is just tech companies circumventing almost all laws about workers rights. But yes, definitely Brexit too.

The truth is that Rishi Sunak is very happy to sacrifice the young to bad outcomes because he doesn’t think they’ll vote for him anyway so he can punch down without fear of electoral impact.

I don’t see anything correct in spending £20k of their election budget on a logo. No one likes new logos and everyone thinks they’re not worth the money. Well thank goodness this one is!

Yeah, Pret a Manger has a reputation for being expensive and pretentious, whereas Greggs has a reputation for being cheap and unpretentious.

The point of Betteridge’s law isn’t really that they’re false, it’s that the editor hasn’t got the evidence that it’s true because if they did it wouldn’t be a question.

In this case it’s a hard no. The main threat to Labour isn’t the greens it’s people thinking it’s a forgone conclusion and not voting, the new constituencies that reduce the number of city seats because poor people register to vote less than others, which reduces the number of Labour MPs, voter disenfranchisement, the Conservative Party election machine which will narrow the polls as we go through the weeks and biased coverage from the print and broadcast media.

Last night a BBC report on the election has several minutes covering Rishi’s “energetic” election campaign with plenty of clips of him claiming to like talking to people, then a single soundbite from each of Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and Reform followed by a still of Keir Starmer with a voice over saying he was campaigning too and then a one minute segment on controversy once Diane Abbot. The message was “Rishi is working hard to meet lots of ordinary people, here’s some quotes for balance, and Labour are divided.” I think the Conservatives are far more divided and that Labour will work far harder for ordinary people, but I’m not a conservative donor who’s been appointed to make editorial decisions about BBC politics, so what would I know?

No.

Wikipedia: Betteridge’s law of headlines

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.

History
Betteridge’s name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous TechCrunch article that carried the headline “Did Last . fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?” (Schonfeld 2009):

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

A similar observation was made by British newspaper editor Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade, among Marr’s suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles:

If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no’. Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.

Clues: former Chancellor in multi-million pound tax avoidance scandal: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/nadhim-zahawi-sacked-tory-party-chair-tax-affairs-rishi-sunak

Reminder: all this incorrect fuss about a potential couple of thousands of tax is just to distract from the former actual Conservative Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi having to settle an unpaid tax dispute from HMRC of how much now? An estimated £5,000,000. Yes, five million pounds.

And he breached the ministerial code three times that I know of: he didn’t declare to officials that he was under investigation by HMRC when he was appointed Chancellor by Conservative Chancer-in-Chief Boris Johnson, he didn’t declare that he’d paid a settlement for tax avoidance when he was appointed to cabinet by Conservative Economy-Crasher-in-Chief Liz Truss, nor when appointed again by Conservative Chaos-and-Non-Chief Rishi Sunak.

£5,000,000. When ordinary folk don’t pay their taxes, it’s called tax evasion, it’s a crime, and you go to prison. When rich people don’t pay tax, it’s called tax avoidance, and if they’re found out as breaking the rules, they pay a bit more than they would have done and no-one goes to prison.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/nadhim-zahawi-sacked-tory-party-chair-tax-affairs-rishi-sunak https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/15/nadhim-zahawi-to-pay-millions-in-tax-after-dispute-over-family-finances