Canvassing also breaks down when you party collapses in the polls. For every voter who shouts at you there are 50 who are polite but don't bother voting for you this time or are too kind to tell you.
Time's up for Labour. More people are realising what's at stake in May's local elections, with politics expert Sam Freedman and LondonCentric predicting that Labour will lose their majority on Southwark Council.
The Lib Dems are ready to fix Southwark!
Hunger and even famine are foreseeable consequences of the war on Iran.
Now the world must act to shield the poorest from effects that will continue long after the fighting stops: ft.trib.al/nYnYDlO
Much less fun!
Also one other thing: Labour council groups iirc need NEC approval for coalitions.
If the NEC decides that it's strategically bad to do this, then you could see huge areas leave Labour control for the first time in decades.
This sounds fun. I'm wondering if I could do this as a sponsored event?
... for the opposition.
Therefore if you want to lead a council, you are going to *have* to have a coalition. And that's particularly hard for Labour where opposition parties are going to be very reluctant to work with them formally.
Great stuff. There's a NOC dynamic that may come back to bite Labour.
If you have a hung council then there's an option of something like 'confidence & supply'. But in London this won't happen because most councils are Leader + Cabinet models - where this would mean virtually no power...
That sounds pretty good, short term.
Medium term I'm assuming you're on the fast route to gout, alcholism and bowel problems.
An amazing contrast with private sector GDPR compliance - where I routinely see stuff that is *obviously* non compliant (e.g. mandatory opt-ins to email lists) but where the company has decided that the relatively small risk is worth it.
Thank you.
Thank you. It just seems really odd that GDPR isn't pretty much automatically trumped by vetting!
edstone spontaneously arising from the water while thus spake zarathustra plays
I don't really understand how privacy is an issue. Doesn't GDPR have carve outs for national security?
You'd normally rescind it if the references were bad, wouldn't you?
Added to my Blackie Snacks map:
maps.app.goo.gl/mW2yLbEt4b2a...
Small bonus of joining the Liberal Democrat team in Sutton this lunchtime: good response from voters and an excellent value Sri Lankan curry for lunch.
"The FSB, IRGC and other terror organisations are waging a terror campaign against Britain's Jewish population using gullible young people as undetectable proxies" is a national security crisis we are just deciding not to think about
Vetting would obviously be about preventing criminal offences unless you are being insanely cautious.
This is a really weird thing, assuming it's true. GDPR is full of carveouts for reasonable behaviours.
e.g. a quick Google gets you this: 'GDPR does not apply to data processing for security purposes or for preventing, investigating, detecting, or prosecuting criminal offences.'
It's easy to forget that the world is being very successful at decarbonising - because the technologies are now, mainly, cheaper to run than the alternatives.
We're not going fast enough but that's a much easier problem to solve than having to invent new technologies.
I suppose it will come down to whether you believe Starmer would not have appointed Mandelson if he knew he failed the vetting.
He was prepared to overlook all the issues already flagged by the Cabinet Office. If they were the same issues, would he really have said, actually let's cancel it?
I believe Phillips O'Brien has written a bit about this:
phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-usa-do...
There's a really good case that drone warfare makes a lot of current military spending irrelevant, isn't there?
e.g. If large parts of the battlefield is just drone vs drone warfare - presumably tanks become a lot less useful?
... of capabilities.
... we aren't fighting a war that ends up consuming huge numbers of drones and ammunition every day.
It sounds smart to say that military spending has to massively increase - but at the moment this argument seems to be made on the grounds that it feels like it should - not for any specific set...
Ukraine's defence budget this year is about £64bn = 2% of UK GDP. For that they are completely occupying the world's fifth biggest army.
It's not obvious to me why the UK has to have a much bigger defence budget than Ukraine.
Yes our military salaries will be a lot higher but equally....
Today, inundated by reporters wanting to know implications of humanoid robot winning a half marathon. NONE! As a kid read about a Chinese American serviceman beating a computer with an abacus. 1000's of humans separated by a fence from robot running in the same sized lane. Wheels, people, wheels.
It's like Versailles but with a small kitchen.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYJ5...