Thursday 5th October 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

Terfs and fascists, hand in hand

[AnatolyKasparov]

Good morfternoon, all - bit quiet compared with yesterday.

[RogerOThornhill]

Good afternoon.

After yesterday's announcement of "Our edu reforms have been great...which is why we're tearing up the 16-19 bit in place of something that has been proposed (and dropped before)" I looked for a comment from The World's Greatest Headteacher. Given that she leads a secondary school and was crowing about her A level results...but nothing so far.

It couldn't be because they don't actually teach any technical subjects for 16-19 could it? Maybe...

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Oh god no, I detest Tony Parsons with every fibre of my being. This is going to be a tough one. I may be physically sick the moment he opens his mouth. Just looking at his stupid face is dredging up primeval violent urges from my subconscious.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

From TC2 yesterday.

Hey Sky are you off to New Order on Saturday?

The cheapest standing tickets were £75, so no, absolutely not. My plans for Saturday are to delude myself into thinking that Scotland have a chance of beating Ireland in the Rugby World Cup, watching it with a friend who also supports Scotland, then having a number of consolatory drinks afterwards when our hopes are crushed. Which may sound shit but paying a fortune to see New Order in a giant, hideous corporate arena sounds way worse.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Google's search shenanigans.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Richard Walker is the businessman who has recently dumped the Tories, of course.

[refitman]

This "planning for the future" thing the Tories have been talking about is just going swimmingly

[AnatolyKasparov]

Louise Haigh is a genuine good un.

[frog222]

Louise Haigh is a genuine good un.

Denys Bennett - @denysbennett@mas.to
@denysbennett
This lot aren’t even competent at being fascists. Mussolini at least built infrastructure, had an industrial strategy & made the trains run on time. They are instead simply nihilists dedicated to wrecking everything, with the sole aim of giving Starmer an impossible job to do.

The scorched-earth policy of flogging off the land purchased for the next phase is genius !

[AnatolyKasparov]

Still possible there might be an attempt at a judicial review regarding the "scorched earth" thing on the HS2 route.

[tinyclanger2]

From TC2 yesterday.

Hey Sky are you off to New Order on Saturday?

The cheapest standing tickets were £75, so no, absolutely not. My plans for Saturday are to delude myself into thinking that Scotland have a chance of beating Ireland in the Rugby World Cup, watching it with a friend who also supports Scotland, then having a number of consolatory drinks afterwards when our hopes are crushed. Which may sound shit but paying a fortune to see New Order in a giant, hideous corporate arena sounds way worse.

My mistake

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Question Time tonight came from Wolverhampton. Founded by Wulfrun a Mercian noblewoman who at one point was captured and held for ransom by the Danes, which the family evidently didn't take great offence at because her grand daughter married Cnut, the Danish king of England.

For the Tories we had Richard Holden. Saying Richard looked like he didn't want to be there would be paying a gross disservice to how miserable and pissed off he appeared for the entire hour. Sullen, snide and short tempered Richard's performance had all the vibes of a moody teenager at a family dinner they'd been forced to attend. To be fair to Richard he's always been a miserable, thin skinned prick, but this evening there was something else. An exasperation that despite his best efforts to explain how wonderful things were under this government the audience just blankly stared back at him as if he wasn't there. There was no heckling, or laughing, and definitely no clapping. It was if he was talking to an utterly indifferent brick wall and after a couple of questions his head slumped and you could see the fight go out of him. He still managed to make a dick of himself though by unpleasantly attacking the Iceland bloke by suggesting he'd only denounced the Conservatives because they hadn't accepted him as a candidate, which didn't go down well with anyone.

For Labour we had Jonathan Ashworth. Now usually those words would inspire an exaggerated yawn, but not tonight! Because tonight Jonathan, for whatever reason, was bounding with energy and righteous fury. Witness Jonathan spitting feathers about the Tories' abandonment of 'The North'. Marvel at Jonathan's impassioned defence of the multicultural Leicester he represents after Braverman slagged it off to some yanks. Gasp as Jonathan absolutely skewers Richard Holden by pointing out that most of the Northern transport projects Sunak is promising to use the HS2 money on were announced years ago and the Tories have done fuck all about them in over a decade so why should anyone believe them now? Not even Sunak's ban on mobile phones in schools was spared as Jonathan explained that it was already government guidance so they were announcing something which was already in place. Where has this Jonathan Ashworth been? And can we have him back shadowing work and pensions rather than vapid simpleton Starmer replaced him with?

For arseholes we had Tony Parsons. As I mentioned above I can't be doing with him. He talked shit at the NME, talked shit back in the day on Newsnight review, and has talked shit in various newspapers ever since. He's the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, a profoundly dull-witted contrarian of the Toby Young ilk who thinks he's a cultural genius. So you'd think I'd have been enraged by him this evening, but no. Other than claiming Sunak was 'brave' and semi-defending Braverman (while decrying her language) he was boring. A shadow of his former arsehole self. Perhaps he sees his ex-wife as a cautionary tale.

For making up words we had Emma Dabiri. To be fair it was only one word, but she said it twice for emphasis...'obfusication'. Clearly she meant obfuscation but as a writer and academic getting words right is a little bit important. Besides that she was brimming with left wing talking points and admitted using smartphones had reduced her attention span. Which may explain her scattergun approach to answering questions which involved throwing everything chaotically at the wall from neoliberalism to 'The Atlantic' articles from the 1990's. Despite how sniffy I sound I really liked her.

For cheap frozen food and dashed Tory hopes we had Richard Walker. Richard seems to think the Tories turned him down because he thinks for himself and wasn't prepared to toe the party line. In all honesty I reckon they turned him down because to them he sounds like a weak, limp wristed liberal. Why the fuck he was so desperate to join them that he wrote to Sunak is beyond me. It smacks of Rory Stewart levels of naivety. The Conservative party of old where such people would be welcome is dead. Farage set fire to it and spent the last couple of days inspecting the ashes.

[refitman]

Cheers Sky.

Walker's a CEO - that's why he was attracted to the Tories. Can't be paying too much tax now, can we?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[Sky'sGoneOut]