Sat 27th
23:36
Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans helps with latest Liberal Democrat election poster
Embed from Getty Images Marina Hyde, in her demolition of Katie Hopkins, quotes P.G. Wodehouse's immortal paragraph on Roderick Spode's Black Shorts: Katie's spiritual analogue is Roderick Spode, PG Wodehouse's piss-take of Oswald Mosley, and a chap to whom Bertie Wooster is moved to remark: "The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your ...
There are no immediate plans to deploy military personnel on to the streets of Leicester, Leicestershire or Rutland, the Leicester Mercury reported yesterday. I can't speak for Uppingham or Oakham, but I did not see any troops in Leicester today. What I did see were police armed with automatic weapons. If this was a response to the level of terrorist threat, then fair enough. But if it was meant to be reassuring, then in my case it failed. I suspect it is a generational thing. I am old enough to imagine I remember the England of Gideon and Dixon of ...
No sooner had I clicked 'publish' on my last notebook, cavalierly asserting I couldn't be bothered with the polls this election 'because the gulf between the Tories and Labour this time means that it actually is pointless', than along comes that YouGov shocker showing the gap cut to just 5%. I'll eat Paddy's hat if that's the result, but, still, the race does appear to be tightening. And that's upended the expectations of many, me included, who reckoned Labour would drift further down in the polls as the voters neared decision time; and that faced between the stark choice of ...
Welcome to the latest of my general election briefing videos, this time explaining an important detail about window posters.
The body-language at the G7 Summit in Taormina this weekend has been absolutely fascinating. Emmanuel Macron made a beeline for Angela Merkel, and rightly so. This is now Europe's political power couple and their joint determination to reform the European Union is something we should all warmly welcome. This makes it doubly tragic that Britain [...]
Another piece of evidence for the Olympic women's hockey theory of politics, aka the public pays far less attention to politics than most political activists realise: Almost 20 per cent of people in Britain do not know that Theresa May is the leader of the Conservative Party. [The Indepdendent] Get polling news and analysis by email Sign up here if you would like to receive the Polling UnPacked occasional email newsletter, highlighting the best in analysis and news about British political opinion polling from a carefully curated range of high-quality sites (no more than one email a day and usually ...
On Thursday evening, the one and only hustings meeting of the campaign in Blaydon took place at Strathmore Road Methodist Church in Rowlands Gill. It was my first chance to meet the Conservative candidate Tom Smith, kindly paying us a visit from London! He seemed a pleasant enough person. Sadly, the Space Navies Party candidate was not present, presumably on some interplanetary trek going
I posted last week about my efforts to discover whether or not the house where I lived in Germany in the summer of 1986 was, as my landlord's daughter claimed, situated astride the old frontier between the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Kingdom of Württemberg. A bit more research using the desktop rather than relying on the iPad apps has definitively resolved the issue. First of all, I was delighted to find the 1902 Meßtischblatt for Schwaigern, which clearly shows the boundaries of the Schluchtern enclave. Secondly, I don't generally use OpenStreetMap but in this case I found the ...
Practical, fully-costed, optimistic: here's the right path for our country's future.
It makes sense that Paddy should write for the Plymouth Herald on defence given the city's strategic importance. He took the Government to task for cutting the Marines – about which he knows more than most people: For more than three centuries - from Gibraltar and Trafalgar to Normandy and Afghanistan - the Royal Marines have epitomised those qualities. They have fought in more theatres and won more battles than any other British unit. In our nation's hours of danger, they have been, as Lord St Vincent predicted in 1802, "the country's sheet anchor". So the news that the Government ...
miss_s_b | The Blood is the Life for 26-05-2017 I posted The Blood is the Life for 26-05-2017 to my dreamwidth blog Kids With Their Superhero Shadows | The Mary Sue This is beautiful DC Super Hero Girls Gets a New Series From Cartoon Network They'd better show it in the UK! Supergirl - Extended "Wonder Woman" Promo - YouTube In which the cast of my current fave TV show do a little promo for the new Wonder Woman movie and it's ACE. gallifrey_times | GT for Friday the 26th of May 2017 I posted GT for Friday the 26th ...
Like all of us I have spent the last few days deeply impacted by the events in Manchester. As a mother who has, like so many of us, lain awake waiting for the turn of the key in the lock to know, however old your kids are, they are home, I grieve for every young life that has been taken from us. Their loss is not just to their families, or communities, but to us all. John Donne puts it so beautifully 'ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee'. Youth should be a time of such ...
For context, I'm making this prediction whilst Labour have closed the gap on the Tories to only 5 points, with the Conservatives on 43 and Labour on 38. This is a massive closing in on May compared to where we started the campaign, with the Tories on around 50% and Labour on about 25. It is for this reason I'm making my prediction now. I recall seeing in the run up to the 2015 general election, Phillip Collins saying that he knew Ed Miliband wasn't going to be prime minister because it was just obvious that he wasn't; all you ...
Meme grabbed from [IMG: [personal profile] ] sfred and [IMG: [personal profile] ] ghoti ( Meme list ) 1: A song you like with a colour in the title: This one took me a while to think of. I toyed with saying 'anything off Chris T-T's 9 Green Songs album', but none of the songs on the album have a colour in the title themselves, so this was clearly cheating. In the end, I went for Fade to Grey, by Visage. Yes, grey's a colour. This is just distilled essence of early Eighties, right down to the lyrics being jointly ...
The following piece I penned for our weekly Digital Inspirational email at Teneo Blue Rubicon. Do sign up if you'd like such stories in your inbox every week. Social media is the second most important source of election news for voters, and twice as important as local news outlets, according to new polling from Survation. Asked where they receive most of their information about political parties during the election, 14% of voters picked social media, ahead of 7% for local media and second only - albeit by a large margin - to national media at 61%. As you might expect, ...
"Can Norman Lamb hold on in Leave voting North Norfolk?" is the headline from a PoliticsHome article. The constituency is profiled and this is what Norman has to say about it: After four general election victories, can the region's lone Lib Dem fend off the Tories and cling on his largely rural constituency for a fifth time? On the surface the signs are ominous. In 2015, his majority dropped to just over 4,000. In last year's referendum, North Norfolk voted to leave the European Union by 59%. And while the Greens are getting behind Lamb, Ukip has pulled out of ...
The Guardian wins Headline of the Day. Doug Bracewell is a New Zealand cricketer. Readers of my generation will think of him as the son of the fast bowler Brendan Bracewell (who toured England in 1978 but soon faded because of injury) and the nephew of the spinner John Bracewell.
When Your Child Is a Psychopath Chilling, long read. (tags: psychology )
I have already commented on the failure of both Labour and the Tories to even pretend to make the sums in their manifestos add up, but the last word as ever must go to the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies. As the Evening Standard points out, the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies hsve said that the Labour leader should abandon the "pretence" that only the rich would be hit when it came to fund his plans for more public spending: In a damning report, it said there were "factual mistakes" in shadow chancellor John McDonnell's budget plans and a reliance ...
It's been a bit of a blast winning football trophies - particularly when it was 114 years between victories. But as Aberdeen or Celtic will become the 2017 winners later today I thought it would be good to show just how much Hibs win meant to the fans and has transformed the club's future. This bit of sillyness sums up that day in May 2016. I give you Sir David Gray.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an album about which it is, I think, impossible to talk sensibly or objectively. For the generation for whom it was created — those a few years younger than the Beatles themselves, people ... Continue reading →
In a Parliamentary election, candidates are entitled to send a leaflet to voters via the Royal Mail. Mine arrived on Monday 22nd May, just before the postal votes started to arrive. Labour's arrived a few days before. As of 12.20am on Saturday 27th May, none of the other parties have yet sent out their freepost leaflet though lots of people will now have used their postal vote.
