They'll use it to channel investigative power over ministerial affairs into the hands of the Cabinet/PM so this won't happen again.
The Tories are blaming their failure on the civil service. Cummings (another "Dom") was one of the ones that started the "Remainer Blob in Whitehall" stuff. It's a rehash of blaming the EU for everything the UK's elected government is responsible for. Raab has blamed "the blob" and Rees-Mogg was also blaming "the blob" this week. In the media Goodwin (another moron) is also blaming the blob, which it seems Gary Lineker is now part of. The blob starts looking like a many headed mythological creature, that includes the civil service/Guardian newspaper/Lineker/Corbyn/Labour/trade unions/remainers/woke/liberals/socialists/ECHR/climate change activists. It's culture wars garbage that somehow includes the people running the UK state within its definition of the enemy.Lobby wrote: ↑Fri Apr 21, 2023 6:12 pmRaab's pathetic claim that he was targeted by 'activist civil servants' seems to be following the Liz Truss KamiKwarzi playbook, and is specifically countered by the report into his bullying which states that the Ministry of Justice officials who submitted a joint complaint about Raab were “sincere and committed civil servants” who had “no ulterior agenda”.
They made him do this.
It also sounds like all the taxpayer money to pay for sex \h\h\h, to pay for computer lessons was wasted.On March 26, as a group of officials and aides waited to go into the prime minister’s study to brief him, they heard him hacking away behind the door, repeatedly, coughing and spluttering. “He’s got Covid, hasn’t he?” they murmured to each other nervously before he called them in. But they went into the airless room nevertheless. “Cleo [Watson] brought in some Lemsip for him, as if that was going to help. I thought vaguely this isn’t what we should have been doing. We all knew he was ill.”
The previous day he had been due to meet the Queen for their weekly audience, with Palace and No 10 officials going back and forth about whether the meeting could take place in person. Johnson was eager not to be restricted by the new laws or his apparent symptoms, to the dismay of Palace officials deeply concerned at the risk of exposing the elderly Queen to the virus.
After some convincing, both from the Palace and Cummings, the prime minister agreed to hold the conversation by phone. The content of a prime minister’s audience with the sovereign is sacred, with no advisers in attendance and no official record of the discussion. The sanctity of this one would be easier to keep than most: afterwards the Queen turned to an aide and commented that she couldn’t hear a word of what Johnson had said, he was coughing so much. Had the meeting gone ahead as planned, the head of government would probably have given the head of state the virus, a scandal not even Johnson could have downplayed.
https://archive.is/1FzW9#selection-1035.0-1035.347He was entirely unsuited to remote working and isolation, his early illness frequently breaking into farce. His fumbling constantly disconnected his iPad from Zoom and he was clueless as to how he could rejoin the meeting, so a series of connected iPads were set up. Once he had broken the first, he could grab the second, then third, then fourth.
But, but but - surely all that's due to illegal immigrants, Corbyn, Remoaners, Lefty lawyers, mainstream media, lily-livered Civil Servants and wokey snowflakes.....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics- ... gn=KARANGADiane Abbott has been suspended as a Labour MP pending an investigation into a letter she wrote about racism for the Observer, the party has said.
The politician said "many types of white people with points of difference" can experience prejudice, in a letter published on Sunday.
But they are not subject to racism "all their lives", she said.
She later tweeted to say she was withdrawing her remarks and apologised "for any anguish caused".
Labour said the comments were "deeply offensive and wrong".
The BBC has approached Ms Abbott for comment.
Thick as two planks if she thinks "I sent the first draft by mistake" is any kind of excuse!!tabascoboy wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 11:49 am In other news, Labour have withdrawn the whip from Diane Abbott
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics- ... gn=KARANGADiane Abbott has been suspended as a Labour MP pending an investigation into a letter she wrote about racism for the Observer, the party has said.
The politician said "many types of white people with points of difference" can experience prejudice, in a letter published on Sunday.
But they are not subject to racism "all their lives", she said.
She later tweeted to say she was withdrawing her remarks and apologised "for any anguish caused".
Labour said the comments were "deeply offensive and wrong".
The BBC has approached Ms Abbott for comment.
Please god. At least then i could vote labour with a clear conscience. It sticks in my craw to have to vote for herSaintK wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 12:17 pmThick as two planks if she thinks "I sent the first draft by mistake" is any kind of excuse!!tabascoboy wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 11:49 am In other news, Labour have withdrawn the whip from Diane Abbott
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics- ... gn=KARANGADiane Abbott has been suspended as a Labour MP pending an investigation into a letter she wrote about racism for the Observer, the party has said.
The politician said "many types of white people with points of difference" can experience prejudice, in a letter published on Sunday.
But they are not subject to racism "all their lives", she said.
She later tweeted to say she was withdrawing her remarks and apologised "for any anguish caused".
Labour said the comments were "deeply offensive and wrong".
The BBC has approached Ms Abbott for comment.
Another Corbynista to be deselected before the next election. Playing right into Starmer's hands.
The Tories attacking the UK state is becoming a constant theme. During the Brexit wars there were attacks on the judiciary and May's civil servant team (Robbins). When Cummings had some power it was "the remainer liberal Whitehall blob". During the Truss era it was "Treasury orthodoxy". Rees-Mogg and Raab are now criticising "the blob" (meaning the civil service)._Os_ wrote: ↑Wed Oct 12, 2022 10:23 am I predicted on this thread a year ago that the BoE would become a battleground, we're now about to see who wins that battle. I've seen a few populist/nationalist shit shows, the civil service always becomes a battleground too and that's when the real damage gets done.
Good god!
One of the police on a bike said "It's the Prime Minister"
18 seconds on the video, female PC says "It's the Prime Minister". Guy shouting at everyone is a bit of a loon though by the sounds of it
Even if it was, it's not normal practice as was inferred.
Practice for the coronation maybe then? Still seems absurdly OTT whether for Rishi or not.Slick wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 2:12 pmEven if it was, it's not normal practice as was inferred.
Ha ha. Watched it with sound off and was focusing on visual clues - vehicles and order was same as the one for HM funeral.tabascoboy wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 2:12 pm18 seconds on the video, female PC says "It's the Prime Minister". Guy shouting at everyone is a bit of a loon though by the sounds of it
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/ ... 76211.htmlThe Home Office claimed there has been an increase in immigration offences by gig economy workers in London.
It said immigration officers carried out “extensive inelligence-gathering” ahead of the operation to identify “hotspots for illegal moped delivery drivers”.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman said: “Illegal working damages our communities, cheats honest workers out of employment and defrauds the public purse. As the Prime Minister has set out, we are committed to going further and faster to prevent the abuse of our laws and borders.
Looks like she'll be a gonner. Submitted the letter twice and made no effort to alter it for 7 days and it was from her private e-mail accountHappyhooker wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 12:31 pm Please god. At least then i could vote labour with a clear conscience. It sticks in my craw to have to vote for her
The letter was identical each time it was sent, three hours apart, and the suspended Labour MP made no efforts to revise it in the seven days after it was sent.
The fact that it was sent from her own email address – not from one controlled by an aide – suggests that she was entirely in control of the process.
The first time the email was sent, the JC understands, Abbott received an automatic reply asking her to send it again but this time with the addition of a postal address. She did this, leaving the text of the letter unchanged.
I don't know if it's astonishing or not, that so many politicians seem to have no idea that almost everything they do on electronic systems leaves a trace with dates and times - and even if they delete stuff it's still held on a backup somewhere. At least this does help to catch idiots and liars in the net.SaintK wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 10:02 amLooks like she'll be a gonner. Submitted the letter twice and made no effort to alter it for 7 days and it was from her private e-mail accountHappyhooker wrote: ↑Sun Apr 23, 2023 12:31 pm Please god. At least then i could vote labour with a clear conscience. It sticks in my craw to have to vote for herThe letter was identical each time it was sent, three hours apart, and the suspended Labour MP made no efforts to revise it in the seven days after it was sent.
The fact that it was sent from her own email address – not from one controlled by an aide – suggests that she was entirely in control of the process.
The first time the email was sent, the JC understands, Abbott received an automatic reply asking her to send it again but this time with the addition of a postal address. She did this, leaving the text of the letter unchanged.
If she'd stuck purely to the current day, she may have been half right. Even then, it may have been pushing it. However the moment she started trying to pick examples through history to suggest it's only been blacks that have suffered from racism (as she chooses to define it), it became a massive pile of bullshit._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:43 amAbbott is a minor historically important figure (in other words will be remembered long after most other MPs), the UK's first black female MP who has been in parliament for decades. One of the MPs that receives the most racist abuse on a weekly basis and death threats too. It's obvious that Starmer wants to get rid of her because she's the target of abuse from the tabloids, Starmer is determined to please the tabloids and give them nothing to attack. As for her view that in the UK whites experience less racism on an ongoing basis than those who aren't white, isn't that just empirically true (most people in the UK being white)? It looks like fake outrage to me.
It's in incidents like this you can start to work out how Starmer will attempt to govern. There'll be a large bloc in his party that hate him from the get go.
Note also the examples are all from abroad. She knew exactly what she was writing.Raggs wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:52 amIf she'd stuck purely to the current day, she may have been half right. Even then, it may have been pushing it. However the moment she started trying to pick examples through history to suggest it's only been blacks that have suffered from racism (as she chooses to define it), it became a massive pile of bullshit._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:43 amAbbott is a minor historically important figure (in other words will be remembered long after most other MPs), the UK's first black female MP who has been in parliament for decades. One of the MPs that receives the most racist abuse on a weekly basis and death threats too. It's obvious that Starmer wants to get rid of her because she's the target of abuse from the tabloids, Starmer is determined to please the tabloids and give them nothing to attack. As for her view that in the UK whites experience less racism on an ongoing basis than those who aren't white, isn't that just empirically true (most people in the UK being white)? It looks like fake outrage to me.
It's in incidents like this you can start to work out how Starmer will attempt to govern. There'll be a large bloc in his party that hate him from the get go.
Her wording seemed ham fisted to me, I'm just trying to get at the point she definitely was making and not trying to invent a load of stuff she wasn't saying at all.Raggs wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:52 amIf she'd stuck purely to the current day, she may have been half right. Even then, it may have been pushing it. However the moment she started trying to pick examples through history to suggest it's only been blacks that have suffered from racism (as she chooses to define it), it became a massive pile of bullshit._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:43 amAbbott is a minor historically important figure (in other words will be remembered long after most other MPs), the UK's first black female MP who has been in parliament for decades. One of the MPs that receives the most racist abuse on a weekly basis and death threats too. It's obvious that Starmer wants to get rid of her because she's the target of abuse from the tabloids, Starmer is determined to please the tabloids and give them nothing to attack. As for her view that in the UK whites experience less racism on an ongoing basis than those who aren't white, isn't that just empirically true (most people in the UK being white)? It looks like fake outrage to me.
It's in incidents like this you can start to work out how Starmer will attempt to govern. There'll be a large bloc in his party that hate him from the get go.
Pretty much my view, but much more eloquently put than I could ever manage._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:43 am The defenestration of Corbyn and now probably Abbott looks bad to me. Stalinist control freakery. I don't share their politics, but it's telling that Blair could tolerate both of them but Starmer cannot. Starmer's New Labour mk2 will be less tolerant of difference than New Labour mk1 was. People you disagree with can also be right sometimes, they were both right on apartheid and the Iraq invasion, when not all their fellow parliamentarians were.
It's similar to how Johnson/Cummings purged the Tories, and the outcome was worse governance. It's an example of how elements that are found in Proportional Representation systems are forcing their way into the UK's FPTP system, the political culture is changing but not the systems which that culture acts in, and the UK is ending up with the worst of both PR and FPTP. In a PR system the party bosses have a lot of power, because an MP's place is dependant on where they are on the party list, a party boss can strip an MP of their seat (this is why many PR systems opt for some seats to be constituency linked, and the remainder to be a top up from a list to make it proportional). When entire wings of a party are being purged like this by party bosses, and a party turned into something much narrower, it's exactly how parties in a PR system work. But it's not a PR system, so there's very little chance of forming a new party to represent those purged views which is able to get anywhere.
Both Corbyn and Abbott are examples of FPTP working as it should, whatever they are they have strong constituency support and haven't been parachuted in, they also speak their mind even if it's against the party. If they can be purged from a party and replaced by someone parachuted in, it ends up weakening the entire FPTP system. Obviously it's not the case local branches are selecting candidates of their choice, then those candidates are being elected as MPs and are directly accountable to their constituents first, and freely speak their mind as MPs (as they did when winning branch support). Instead party bosses have outsized control in candidate selection, parachuted candidates become MPs, they are then just yes men/women because they fear being purged.
Abbott is a minor historically important figure (in other words will be remembered long after most other MPs), the UK's first black female MP who has been in parliament for decades. One of the MPs that receives the most racist abuse on a weekly basis and death threats too. It's obvious that Starmer wants to get rid of her because she's the target of abuse from the tabloids, Starmer is determined to please the tabloids and give them nothing to attack. As for her view that in the UK whites experience less racism on an ongoing basis than those who aren't white, isn't that just empirically true (most people in the UK being white)? It looks like fake outrage to me.
It's in incidents like this you can start to work out how Starmer will attempt to govern. There'll be a large bloc in his party that hate him from the get go.
The big problem with the argument is that it is bullshit though - Travellers are by a street the most discriminated group in the country (and everywhere else in Europe for that matter), like most European countries a huge facet of our history has been inter-European racism (the concept of 'whiteness' may just about work in the US but is just silly in Europe), and of course what the Jews have faced and continue to face needs no introduction. The concept of race well predates the colonial era. So if she has been doing some reading I'd suggest she uses her time out of the Labour Party to do a bit more._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 12:17 pmHer wording seemed ham fisted to me, I'm just trying to get at the point she definitely was making and not trying to invent a load of stuff she wasn't saying at all.Raggs wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:52 amIf she'd stuck purely to the current day, she may have been half right. Even then, it may have been pushing it. However the moment she started trying to pick examples through history to suggest it's only been blacks that have suffered from racism (as she chooses to define it), it became a massive pile of bullshit._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:43 amAbbott is a minor historically important figure (in other words will be remembered long after most other MPs), the UK's first black female MP who has been in parliament for decades. One of the MPs that receives the most racist abuse on a weekly basis and death threats too. It's obvious that Starmer wants to get rid of her because she's the target of abuse from the tabloids, Starmer is determined to please the tabloids and give them nothing to attack. As for her view that in the UK whites experience less racism on an ongoing basis than those who aren't white, isn't that just empirically true (most people in the UK being white)? It looks like fake outrage to me.
It's in incidents like this you can start to work out how Starmer will attempt to govern. There'll be a large bloc in his party that hate him from the get go.
It's clearly something she's invested a lot of her life into and done a lot of reading and thinking on. She seems to have forgotten that not everyone has, and randomly selecting stuff without a fuller explanation doesn't really work. I suspect her full argument looks something like: the concept of race in its modern form was constructed during the colonial era to oppress people who weren't white generally and black people particularly, over centuries this led to structural underdevelopment and exploitation of black people, the legacy of this lasting into the current day, and pretending this isn't the case perpetuates racism. It's a well known argument.
It all looks like a bad faith attempt to get rid of her to me. Everyone in the Labour party understand what she's saying, but some are pretending they don't understand. Al Jazeera's multi part documentary on Labour (ignored by the UK media) also showed that Labour officials have a bit of a racism issue, Abbott herself being the subject of abuse in internal communications.
She's trying to say it's only racism when you suffer from it every day, which is a nonsense in and of itself. The suggestion then that white seeming (to use her terms) have not suffered like blacks have, even historically, is a nonsense._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 12:17 pmHer wording seemed ham fisted to me, I'm just trying to get at the point she definitely was making and not trying to invent a load of stuff she wasn't saying at all.Raggs wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:52 amIf she'd stuck purely to the current day, she may have been half right. Even then, it may have been pushing it. However the moment she started trying to pick examples through history to suggest it's only been blacks that have suffered from racism (as she chooses to define it), it became a massive pile of bullshit._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:43 amAbbott is a minor historically important figure (in other words will be remembered long after most other MPs), the UK's first black female MP who has been in parliament for decades. One of the MPs that receives the most racist abuse on a weekly basis and death threats too. It's obvious that Starmer wants to get rid of her because she's the target of abuse from the tabloids, Starmer is determined to please the tabloids and give them nothing to attack. As for her view that in the UK whites experience less racism on an ongoing basis than those who aren't white, isn't that just empirically true (most people in the UK being white)? It looks like fake outrage to me.
It's in incidents like this you can start to work out how Starmer will attempt to govern. There'll be a large bloc in his party that hate him from the get go.
It's clearly something she's invested a lot of her life into and done a lot of reading and thinking on. She seems to have forgotten that not everyone has, and randomly selecting stuff without a fuller explanation doesn't really work. I suspect her full argument looks something like: the concept of race in its modern form was constructed during the colonial era to oppress people who weren't white generally and black people particularly, over centuries this led to structural underdevelopment and exploitation of black people, the legacy of this lasting into the current day, and pretending this isn't the case perpetuates racism. It's a well known argument.
It all looks like a bad faith attempt to get rid of her to me. Everyone in the Labour party understand what she's saying, but some are pretending they don't understand. Al Jazeera's multi part documentary on Labour (ignored by the UK media) also showed that Labour officials have a bit of a racism issue, Abbott herself being the subject of abuse in internal communications.
She referred to slave ships, who owned the slave ships and indeed the slaves? Who is Abbott descended from?Paddington Bear wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 12:16 pm Note also the examples are all from abroad. She knew exactly what she was writing.
Yep, some are giving here altogether too much benefit of the doubt. The thrust of her point is bloody clear and it's not only nonsense, but deeply offensive and historically ignorant.Paddington Bear wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 12:16 pmNote also the examples are all from abroad. She knew exactly what she was writing.Raggs wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:52 amIf she'd stuck purely to the current day, she may have been half right. Even then, it may have been pushing it. However the moment she started trying to pick examples through history to suggest it's only been blacks that have suffered from racism (as she chooses to define it), it became a massive pile of bullshit._Os_ wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:43 amAbbott is a minor historically important figure (in other words will be remembered long after most other MPs), the UK's first black female MP who has been in parliament for decades. One of the MPs that receives the most racist abuse on a weekly basis and death threats too. It's obvious that Starmer wants to get rid of her because she's the target of abuse from the tabloids, Starmer is determined to please the tabloids and give them nothing to attack. As for her view that in the UK whites experience less racism on an ongoing basis than those who aren't white, isn't that just empirically true (most people in the UK being white)? It looks like fake outrage to me.
It's in incidents like this you can start to work out how Starmer will attempt to govern. There'll be a large bloc in his party that hate him from the get go.
