No one would deny there are bad parents and that teachers need support to deal with them. The more aggravations heaped on people through the cost of living and soaring rents, the more parents there will be struggling/crossing into failing. It’s not the role of Government simply to blame when people struggle. Like you say, initiatives like ‘Sure Start’ made a lot of difference. Instead, the Tories have ramped up the pressure and taken away support. Then they blame. I didn’t see anything unusual in the replies credited to Frith. He simply said people would be astonished, Daly should apologise and I didn’t read anything like a denial that poor behaviour existed. I doubt he was being asked for his vision, but there should be an opportunity for Labour nationally here to say what it would do. As for Squid Games, is that any worse than the games of British Bulldog or Murderball we played at school?
I don't disagree that the games are likely no worse than those played in earlier years, but I doubt the playground game itself is the perceived issue here. I suspect the issue is that some parents let their kiddos watch the show in the first place, when it is clearly not appropriate. There would likely be no playground game if no kid had seen the show. I know from my own schooldays that there were parents who used to let their kids watch thoroughly inappropriate stuff at young ages. And surprise surprise, they were almost always the worst behaving/performing kids.
Fair enough. I haven’t seen Squid Game though as it looks a load of bollox. There is the spin off reality game series which was featured on Gogglebox and that didn’t look too bad.
Liz Truss’s honours list appears, with Vote Leave pals rewarded. A number of Ms Truss’s colleagues are on the list, with the MP for Thurrock, Jacqueline Doyle-Price, recommended for a damehood following her service as industry minister. Doyle-Price held her ministerial office from September to October 2022. https://www.itv.com/news/2023-12-29...espite-calls-for-pm-to-block-resignation-list
Truss's list is a great advert for only allowing hereditary piers to sit in the Lords. And Truss herself is a great advert for ditching the House of Commons
The Vote Leave knobbers, who pretended to be ‘anti-establishment,’ ending up in the House of Lords to the surprise of no one.
In principal I'm agoamt th house of lords at all and definitely hereditary peers, but time and time again evidence shows we'd be better off with them and the royal family running the country.
How do the people vote the lords and royal family out if they want to? Dear me, the appetite for boot leather in Britain is absolutely astonishing! Social conditioning that starts in school really does a number on many, many people. Lots of people (not necessarily you before you leap to your own defence) who see no issue with an unelected Lords, a hereditary royal family or a dreadful honours system also absolutely lost their minds about the EU. It's a weird Venn diagram.
Yes, there are indeed crap parents. But that's not down to some genetic personal failing. For me, it's because of the warped super-consumer capitalist society we live in. Where dog eats dog and everyone's out to rip everyone off. It's the society that makes people's characters. It seems quite possible that they are parenting in the only way they know how - copied from their own parents. Similarly the children may well also go on to be crap parents. It's the lack of education, society, support and the hand-to-mouth way people have to live because of poverty. These things do need 'money throwing at them' in order to resolve them. Well in some sense anyway, in the current system. As you know, I think what's really needed is to abandon money and have a proper progressive society with everyone included. I suspect crap parenting would be another one of the multitude of ills that bedevil us now that would quickly disappear.
Meanwhile No 10 comes out with a ‘both sides’ argument, claiming Labour have done this before and it’s a convention which Rishi has little choice but to follow. Naturally only a very quick bit of research proves that to be utter drivel. The whole thing is completely shameless though.
Another example of the low-grade lying with which the Tories are corroding and corrupting our politics every single day.
No, but circumstances matter. Blair did not issue one because of the cash for honours scandal and neither did Brown. You could argue that Truss giving out honours after just weeks in charge creates a similar issue of undermining confidence in the system as Blair’s would have. But this would have required the Tories to have at least a passing familiarity with the Standards in Public Life.
I don’t disagree at all with that but if the argument is that Sunak had no option but to accept Truss’ list once she had decided to issue one, then I think that is correct. It has to be, otherwise a Tory PM could veto a Labour list, and vice versa. Of course, more importantly, this doesn’t mean that he couldn’t/shouldn’t have had a quiet word to try to stop her from issuing it in the first place. Nor does it alter the fact that the whole honours thing is a scandal.
FTFY. Anyhoo, doesn't Parliament akchewally 'operate' under very, very few 'actual' laws - it's all precedent, procedure and conventions?
It's the Yuletide break - I'm not in one of your seminars now... Besides we are talking about the same 'conventions' such as making governmental announcements to parliament not the media first, not lying to parliament, cabinet members giving addresses about their own portfolios etc...
Drivel in the sense the last resignation honours list from a Labour PM was Harold Wilson. Dissolution honours lists were put forward before every election but neither Blair or Brown put forward a resignation list. The practice was revived by David Cameron in 2016, when the convention had been dormant for 19 years. The whole honours system is nonsense anyway in my view, so things like this are just more evidence to support sweeping away the whole lot.
I don’t get the Brown one, surely he didn’t resign anyway? Well, only in the sense that any defeated PM resigns. He issued a dissolution list.
John Major managed to get in a dissolution list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Dissolution_Honours) and a resignation list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Prime_Minister's_Resignation_Honours) in 1997. I wouldn’t have said he resigned either!
Conservative and right wing voters in general on social media are appalled at the vanity of the Mayor of London for prominently promoting himself at the start of the fireworks display last night. Here’s the photo of the offending moment:
Oops sorry, that was an image from when Boris Johnson was mayor. Maybe it’s delayed fury for some inexplicable reason?
Further evidence that the UK is a broken country run by broken people. Michelle Mone and her husband laughing all the way to the bank while HMRC gets permission to snoop on your eBay, Amazon, Etsy or Vinted accounts in case you're making a few quid selling your stuff. The Daily Mail (and other newspapers and broadcasters) suddenly showing an interest in the Post Office subpostmasters scandal now it's been made into a TV drama, having ignored a huge public interest story for the best part of 20 years, leaving it to the likes of Private Eye and Computer Weekly to do the heavy lifting. James Cleverly.
I'm glad I stayed at home with a bottle of brown ale and a library book.... Cut and pasted for your enjoyment from the Spectator website Fireworks at New Year are the purest distillation of the spirit of frippery. All Sadiq Khan had to do was give ‘em the old razzle dazzle. There is no higher meaning to these colourful explosions, no significance to the spectacle beyond the fun of communal cries of ‘ooh!’ and ‘aah!’ Fireworks are quite enough – more than enough – in themselves. You can leave it to the bangers to do the job; adding anything else on top is not necessary. Appending a civic lecture to a firework display is like adding tripe to a trifle. But Khan, like all the grim municipal fun sponges who run and ruin almost everything nowadays, can’t just sit back and let any harmless pleasure follow its well-established course. We were not left in any doubt as to who had granted us this spectacle, which kicked off with ‘The MAYOR OF LONDON Presents …’ in huge showbizzy letters, reminiscent of The Benny Hill Show, as if he had dug into his own pocket to grant his subjects this boon of bangs. The flashes that followed were indeed spectacular, but were interspersed with paeans to our new top-down megalopolitan touchstones: the Empire Windrush, environmentalism, the NHS (as if a public health provision was unique to Britain!), and same-sex marriage. This was all bundled under the theme ‘London: A Place For Everyone’, which given the blind eye turned by Khan and the police to the horrific displays of mass anti-Semitism in the streets of central London over the last three months is a blatant regime lie worthy of a Second World junta. There is something grimly ironic that a 16 year old was stabbed to death while watching this display. A soul-destroying firework display wasn’t the only example of this phenomenon over the holiday period. The fun destroyers were out in force across the board. At exactly the same time, ITV decided to ring in the New Year with a toe-curlingly sanctimonious montage of ludicrously wealthy actors, including Glenn Close and Idris Elba, lecturing its viewers about climate change. The BBC shovelled up another of its Christmas Agatha Christie adaptations, this time about colonialism apparently. The sheer pleasure of immersing yourself in a classic ‘cosy crime’ puzzle is lost. Yes, there is a difference between the image of Christie’s work and its reality: the novels are frequently harder-edged than their media representations from the later twentieth century suggested, and only acquired their cosy patina many years after they were published. But this doesn’t invalidate the fun and the joy to be taken from that slant – properties the BBC has now sucked out completely. These things were all, not so long ago, toasty delights, little escapes at a special time of year. But now there is to be no escape. The presumption of it all! I can’t imagine being the kind of person who would try to impose my political world view into the world of jolly festive fun. What a rotter you would have to be. The irony is that this is all supposed to be ‘inclusive’ and welcoming, but it is in fact the ‘progressive’ boilerplate ideology of the executive DEI class – of at best about ten to fifteen per cent of the population. Imagine it coming from the opposite end of the spectrum: a gigantic face of Nigel Farage beaming down over the capital; ITV corralling celebs to demand urgent action on stopping the boats; a retelling of Christie that extolled the virtues of pre-Blair Britain. We don’t notice how strange this is because we have been inured to this guff through endless repetition. It is the culture of psychopaths who enjoy ruining other people’s simple pleasures. We suffer this for the rest of the year, and now we must suffer it over Christmas and New Year too. For heavens’ sake, bureaucrats and boondogglers – take a day off!
And, of course, you don't have to look far to link Fujitsu to the Tories. Simon Blagden, was chair of Fujitsu UK. He was a director of the company from 2005 until 2019, spanning the entire period that Fujitsu was supplying its flawed Horizon IT system to the Post Office. Blagden is also a Tory donor. Donated at least £370,000 to the party. On Blagden's watch, Fujitsu also sued the Department of Health for £700m for the early termination of an IT contract. At some point you just have to recognise that this is what all these people are. This is what they do and what they stand for.
I think it's rather mean of the writer to try to score points from a 16 year old getting stabbed the day before. Not really necessary.
Just nasty, lowest common denominator stuff. Let’s hope the Spectator and their fellow culture war warriors get their P45s this year.
