david

Yes, but I think you're overstating how right wing Labour pitched it. There were no claims to be anti woke. I think it was a pretty firmly centrist pitch. It's the Conservatives who are going to panic and try to out-nutcase Farage. Labour are going to try and be responsible and fix the broken ship. It's just whether they can do it fast enough for people to notice a big improvement in the cost of living vs wages problem.

Thank you. But we don't blame regular Aussies. You're good with us.

Yeah, the writer of the article seems to think that the Brexiteers were honest politicians trying to achieve what they believed would be good things for Britain. I don't think that's a widely held view in Britain.

You can't out-Farage Farage. The Putin-sponsored shyster has no limits. Elections are won in the middle ground in the UK. The Conservatives could easily win next time. They just need an affable leader, some more centrist policies and some headlines about how they've had a change of heart and want to be nice to poor people now and balance the books again. Worked for Cameron. Starmer, meanwhile, had to make a difference in the cost of living crisis so large that people notice they're getting better off, and restore hope that our children will be better off than us. Tall order.

She is one remarkably stupid, reality-blind narcissist.

I lived through the Blair government. Some left wing people were upset because he was on the right of the Labour Party, but things did indeed get a lot better in those ten years. Not everything by any stretch of the imagination. But no one expected him to make things better for gay people but not only did the legal situation change but the mood music affected the nation's morals for the better for a while. It became socially far less acceptable to hate on gay folk. Could happen again, but I get why you might be cynical.

It's altogether the wrong question.

Imagine a class who are excited to have a new teacher because the old one was a git and the new one seemed to be not a git, and one of the kids says "I'll get bullied either way." If one of the other kids says "What classroom rules do I have that you don't?" that kid is starting an irrelevant discussion and either doesn't understand, doesn't care about, or supports the bullying that the first kid experiences and no adult would be particularly surprised if it turns out that the kid counting rules was in the same friend group as the bullies.

You see, if there's a rule saying don't pick on kids who have red hair and you start a conversation about how many rules there are about brown haired kids vs red haired kids, you either don't understand why that rule exists at all, or you get it perfectly well and want to abolish it.

If you're complaining that you have fewer rights than someone who has the right to not be discriminated against because they have a protected characteristic under the human rights act, you're being self absorbed and insensitive at best, and no adult will be surprised if you turn out to have said a lot of very unkind things about trans people in the past.

Don't you wish we'd chosen chaos with Ed Milliband instead of the Conservative's Long Term Economic Plan?

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.

The Conservatives are, and always have been, the Nasty Party.

I need my arsehole, though.

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