I'm beginning to make notes for an essay evaluating Margaret #Thatcher's historical legacy; it's my thesis that every single thing wrong with Britain today can be traced directly back to her.
Can anyone think of single thing which she did which has had, in the long term, beneficial consequences?
Pollster Rob Ford, some thoughts:
"Rishi Sunak’s net satisfaction rating of -53 is the worst recorded by MORI one month out from an election in all of the elections they have covered since 1979 - worse than Gordon Brown in 2010 (-36), John Major in 1997 (-46) or James Callaghan in 1979 (-33).
"The net rating of the Sunak government is, at -71, the worst approval of any British government MORI have asked about on the brink of an election...
"More than two thirds of British voters tell MORI the government doesn’t deserve to be re-elected next month, nearly three quarters say it is time for a change, and four fifths say the government has done a bad job. All of these figures are now at the highest level since Sunak took office...
"While a miracle of late persuasion cannot be ruled out, at present the most relevant question for Conservative MPs isn’t “can we win?” but rather “can any of us survive?”"
Nothing says “change” more than checks notes a grey image of a sixty-something white professional man in a shirt and tie with his sleeves rolled up very slightly, with an expression that suggests you’re parking in the spot he usually parks in, which tbf is not a designated parking spot, but he usually parks there and everyone around here knows that, and he accepts that you’re new here, but maybe next time you could remember that, by the way do you follow the football. #ukpol#labour
Sub 100 seats for this lot 😂🤣 (and definitely worth a watch ...)
"The chairman of the Tory Party has abruptly ended an interview with Sky News after he refused to answer questions on his chicken run to a seat in the South.
Richard Holden was asked why he claimed to be "bloody loyal to the North East" before switching to a constituency in Essex. After repeatedly failing to answer the question, a Conservative press officer interrupted to say the interview would be terminated"
The Telegraph: Conservative MPs defy party bosses to take cash from Laurence Fox’s funder
"Multi-millionaire Jeremy Hosking has offered £5,000 each to Tories who sign up to Reclaim party’s key pledges"
"The commitments are leaving the European Court of Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act, banning all forms of gender reassignment for children and reforming the Equality Act to eliminate sex- and race-based discrimination"
“Politicians and figures linked to the far-right Alternative for Germany party use TikTok as a ‘parallel universe’ to spread extremism, a study says. Meanwhile, other parties show ‘weak performance’ on the platform.”
“’We are observing masses of openly right-wing extremist symbols and codes on TikTok’, said Deborah Schnabel, the director of the Anne Frank Educational Center, which conducted the analysis.”
Not spreading hate gets you marked for 'weak performance' in appealing to the youth vote, apparently 🤪
“A number of wealthy climate sceptics are giving funding to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, rightwing Conservatives, and the climate science-denying thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. But who are they and how are they linked?
The biggest donor to the Reform party this year is the shipping magnate Terence Mordaunt, the head of First Corporate Shipping. His personal company, Corporate Consultants Ltd, has given £200,000 to Reform over the past 12 months. He was previously chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) […]”
“The posts seen by the Observer include the suggestion that positive tests for Covid-19 were ‘mass psychosis at work’ and that the Black Lives Matter movement might be an attempt to ‘bring down British society’.”
“One Tory candidate in London is revealed to have referred to the London mayor Sadiq Khan as a ‘snivelling little drip’ who had done more to damage the capital ‘than the Luftwaffe’. Another wrote in a book in 2005 that ‘we must teach people to be prejudiced once again’.”