Xmas weekend 24th-27th December 2022

[refitman]

Morning all

[AnatolyKasparov]

Good morefternoon to everybody.

Anyone got last minute shopping to do today?

[frog222]

Good morefternoon to everybody.
Anyone got last minute shopping to do today?

No way !

A weird thought that this dumbweasel is actually PM ?

[AnatolyKasparov]

Yes, somewhat sub-optimal optics there as the wonks say.

[PaulfromYorkshire]

Fake gala sherry stirred for activist of the year (7,7).

[PaulfromYorkshire]

I always have Christmas Eve shopping to do but it is planned and I go out early. Pick up turkey, fresh pork pie, fresh bread from bakers, couple of last minute veg that didn’t come in the box yesterday.

But I am now all done

[PaulfromYorkshire]

The one thing I nearly forgot was foil!

[refitman]

[frog222]

( I LUV ROSIE HOLT )

[RogerOThornhill]

Good evening.

Well this is cosy...Allegra Stratton's old man ends up in No 10 working for the man who was their best man.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... cretary%2F

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Merry Christmas all.

[refitman]

Back at ya Sky

[gilsey]

Happy Christmas everyone, have a good day.

Our Christmas dinner is postponed until tomorrow due to an unpleasant bout of food poisoning midweek, but we had no other plans so not a problem.

[AnatolyKasparov]

That happened to me going back a few years

Have a great day all.

[gilsey]

[notnowsonny]

A happy Christmas to everyone and an infinitely better new year!

[refitman]

Oops

[frog222]

" A couple of weeks ago I slipped out of a Downing Street drinks reception early so I could go and speak to Nick Thomas-Symonds about his biography of Harold Wilson. Had I written that sentence this time last year you might have asked what was wrong with me. For who would choose an evening discussing a long-dead prime minister over the alternative of mulled wine and canapés with his actual living successor?

These days the calculation is not so clear-cut. If the polls are anywhere near right — and recent by-elections suggest they are — by the Christmas after next the No 10 soirée will have a new host. A host whose name, incidentally, appears on the dustjacket of that life of Wilson with this endorsement: “Deserves to be widely read not only as a fine work of history but also for its lessons in how Labour wins.”

That prospect is no longer fanciful but plausible, if not likely. The Labour leader’s reading list now merits as close examination as trays of prime ministerial blinis.

Sir Keir Starmer has always professed to love Wilson above all other Labour leaders. It is the sort of tricksy answer of which the man himself might have been proud. Blair polarises party and country; Attlee is miscast as the Prince Charming of Corbynite fairytale. Embracing either invites difficult questions.

Another explanation is simpler and altogether more revealing of the fundaments of Starmer’s personality. He cannot bear to lose even when the stakes are low, as aides and shadow cabinet ministers who have shared a football pitch with him attest.

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“He is the most competitive man I have ever met,” one told me when I asked what drove Starmer. On a trip to Scotland earlier this year the leader cleared his diary to take a game of five-a-side against MSPs to extra time, monstering his colleagues until victory came. He has abandoned unloved policies, staff and Jeremy Corbyn with the same lack of ceremony. So of course Starmer likes Wilson. Wilson won. But what comes next?

Towards the end of my conversation with Thomas-Symonds I asked whose biography he might write next. His answer said more about the character of his party than any book could. First came an enthusiastic case for a new life of Barbara Castle, who might have become prime minister but didn’t. Then, tentatively, almost apologetically, he suggested he might want to write about Ramsay MacDonald — who did.

Next year marks the centenary of the election that gave Britain its first Labour government, a short-lived minority administration led by MacDonald. Don’t expect so much as a commemorative tweet from his political descendants, most of whom live in ignorance of the farmhand’s son who led their party to power. “That,” replied one of the few former Labour cabinet ministers still in the Commons when I mentioned the name last week, “is the period of Labour history I know least about.”

Much of this amnesia is wilful. In so far as MacDonald is remembered by the Labour Party, he is despised. Not for that mayfly administration in 1924, nor the second he led from 1929, but for 1931. That year, as unemployment soared, international markets lost confidence in Britain and cabinet ministers mutinied over welfare cuts, he formed a national government with the Conservatives.

He saw himself as the left’s Captain Oates, striding into an “economic blizzard” in an act of patriotic self-sacrifice. In his wake he left a devastated and divided party capable of agreeing only one thing: his treachery. It expelled him. In 1937 he died at sea, a pariah to his old comrades.

His disgrace is perhaps the only aspect of Labour history the party’s squabbling factions do not contest. When aides to Jeremy Corbyn mulled a grand bargain on Brexit with Theresa May, Diane Abbott derided them as the midwives of “the Ramsay MacCorbyn plan”. Even Tony Blair, in the dog days of his premiership, denied he saw himself as “Ramsay MacBlair, betraying the Labour Party’s values or seeking my so-called legacy”.

What one hears much less from Labour people, if at all, is any serious discussion of what MacDonald’s two Labour governments did. This, of course, is partly a consequence of refusing to acknowledge they ever happened, the political equivalent of BBC4 refusing to repeat Jimmy Savile’s episodes of Top of the Pops.

More prosaically, it reflects the fact that neither achieved much at all. The first lasted all of ten months in 1924. The only tangible legacy of the second, AJP Taylor wrote, was the Serpentine Lido. Great reforming governments they were not.

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But why not? At a time of unprecedented crisis, they lacked stable parliamentary majorities of the kind later enjoyed by Attlee, Wilson and Blair. An exchequer drained first by cuts — in the first instance the Geddes Axe of the early 1920s — and then by global depression. Industrial unrest that refused to abate even upon the election of a Labour government. Unemployment so persistent as to seemingly defy any remedy. International investors with neither the faith nor patience in MacDonald’s solutions to the slump and a run on the pound. Against this backdrop, an untested cast of ministers was bound to struggle.

George V had magnanimously allowed Labour “a fair chance”. They barely had a go at all. MacDonald craved establishment credibility above all else. He feared Labour would blow its chance without it. Invited to the Palace for the first time, he hired full court dress from Moss Bros. His chancellor, Philip Snowden, preferred the fiscal straitjacket of Treasury orthodoxy, believing anything but a balanced budget to be the height of irresponsibility.

In the end, overcome by crisis, it was their undoing. “I am not happy about our work,” MacDonald wrote in 1931. “It is too much of the onlooker oppressed by circumstances.”

Not wholly dissimilar circumstances to those that could greet Starmer in No 10. Squint and it is impossible to miss the family resemblance that so many in the Labour Party would deny. Starmer and his shadow ministers say this sort of thing all the time: there is no money and reassuring the City is everything; not everything can be fixed in the first term of a Labour government, even if some around his cabinet table grumble it should be.

A hundred years on, their ambitions have been tempered by hard times and the need to demonstrate that party and country can coexist. Luckily there is a period of their history they can learn from. Perhaps someone should write a book about it. "

Patrick Maguire is Red Box editor

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/revi ... -xhsdczh28

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[AnatolyKasparov]

Of course, Wilson only had a secure majority for half his time as PM - and generally managed the periods he didn't pretty well.

[refitman]

We really are 'blessed' with just the thickest MPs

[AnatolyKasparov]

Even by the "standards" of the 2019 Tory intake, Anderson is "special".

(pleased to see a post here btw!)

[frog222]

Didn't really know what to say to this from my English sister , so I didn't really get started --

" We don’t have tests. As nothing is done, no evidence is collected now, it seems pointless to find out

The UKHSA has stopped tracking the R number, officially"

Well, the ONS still does have something to come up with those ''One in 45 people" figures !

I test when I am a bit concerned about my chronic bronchitis symptoms appearing to worsen , just in case it's the Big C , so that I can avoid people even more, specifically my closest neighbours who are ten years older than me IE -- 85 .

For me it'd be very important to know WHAT any symptoms refer to , as tho flu can be deadly the longer term consequences of C are considerably worse .

Immunity-damage from C , and more consequences such as possibility of surprise cardiac arrests , being cumulative, any fule would minimise repeat infections ... Non ?
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Funnily enough our half-sister in Puerto Rico recounts a very different daily experience to UK and France . Tho Biden has foolishly ( or unscrupulously) declared "Covid Over", there is now some US panic and masks are now free in PR and people use them .

In a poorer area supermarket near her 50+% of people are still masking and 70% are in buses and trains .

Her colleagues test when they have symptoms .

Stats are readily available , tho a little less detailed as most everywhere
https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/loc ... -covid-19/

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OZ may be different to UK and Europe, with a different 'C' History , but info from US and CAN are not reassuring, plus the possibility of New Variants from China .

Good thread --



There's a G article on OZ's new Labor PM, on how SKS can learn from him apparently .

From that thread he looks as useless as Biden, Trudeau, and the Tory Wankers

[frog222]

16 YEARS JAIL FOR WOULD-BE KIDNAPPPER OF

Gretchen Whittmer

GOOD !

[AnatolyKasparov]

She is an absolutely awesome politician too.