Off Topic Politics Thread

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Interesting. I wonder whether this is a specific person or more a general "There'll be someone. They can all see which way the wind's blowing." type of comment.

On Jenrick, that could seriously blow up in Kemi's face. He was second in their leadership election and if he does join Reform now he might be able to take others with him, although I'm not sure that would be a good move for Reform tbh. I've seen a few people make the point that advertising yourselves as a party full of turncoats (especially turncoats who are partly responsible for the mess the country's in) isn't a great look.
 
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SAINTOSPREY said:
www.bbc.co.uk

Jenrick tells BBC his defection to Reform not about personal ambition and will 'unite the right'

In an exclusive interview with Laura Kuenssberg, he says he made the final decision to defect over Christmas.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk

Another Reform recruit?
Click to expand...

I don't doubt it but the good thing is that all the recent defectors to Reform are nutters. This latest defection is demonstrative that the Tories all only think of themselves and not the people they are supppsed to serve.

Not sure if this is good news for Farage as he is now attracting potential MPs who have far more experience than him. I can see Farage being challenged.

It will be interesting to see what happend to Bad Enough. I cannot see her lasting.
 
HIGNFY
The Chief Constable of West Midlands Police is under pressure to resign over the use of AI to create a football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham that never actually took place. Although West Ham still lost 3-1.

NASA astronauts are feeling better after 'emergency evacuation and splashdown'. Well sometimes a good clear-out is all you need.

The UK insists it's almost impossible for sensitive govt data to be transmitted by internet cables close to the China mega embassy, as the govt are signed up to Virgin Broadband.

There was chaos in the Croydon branch of Ikea this week, after one customer kept doing U-turns in the store's one-way system.
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Flag shaggers banned from France.
Ten British "far-right activists" have been banned from France after engaging in actions to stop migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats, the French interior ministry said on Wednesday.

It said the activists, who belonged to a group called Raise the Colours, had been searching for and destroying small boats along France's northern coast, and were involved in "propaganda activity".
 
Ian Thumwood said:
I don't doubt it but the good thing is that all the recent defectors to Reform are nutters. This latest defection is demonstrative that the Tories all only think of themselves and not the people they are supppsed to serve.

Not sure if this is good news for Farage as he is now attracting potential MPs who have far more experience than him. I can see Farage being challenged.

It will be interesting to see what happend to Bad Enough. I cannot see her lasting.
Click to expand...
I think this move strengthens her position enormously. Hopefully, she will out a few more like Braverman in order to position the Tories towards a more centre-right position which will enable them.to recapture votes that went to the Lib Dems last time. Brings back memories of Heath removing Powell from the Shadow Cabinet back in 1968.
 
Puck said:
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Interesting. I wonder whether this is a specific person or more a general "There'll be someone. They can all see which way the wind's blowing." type of comment.

On Jenrick, that could seriously blow up in Kemi's face. He was second in their leadership election and if he does join Reform now he might be able to take others with him, although I'm not sure that would be a good move for Reform tbh. I've seen a few people make the point that advertising yourselves as a party full of turncoats (especially turncoats who are partly responsible for the mess the country's in) isn't a great look.
Click to expand...
I wonder who the labour defector will be, unless he’s on wind up. He could do with one because apparently ‘you can never ever trust a Tory’ and he’s gathering them like moths to a lamp!
 
The Ides of March said:
I think this move strengthens her position enormously. Hopefully, she will out a few more like Braverman in order to position the Tories towards a more centre-right position which will enable them.to recapture votes that went to the Lib Dems last time. Brings back memories of Heath removing Powell from the Shadow Cabinet back in 1968.
Click to expand...

This was the position outlined in the interviews on Radio Four this evening. There was also a consensus that Badenoch had got her act together since the Tory conference and the subsequent PMQs.


I was very surprised by this as i felt the public thought she continued to be hopeless. It is shocking how much coverage Farage gets in the media albeit i recognise that he is a big story. I feel that Reform will ultimately replace the Tories but they have insufficient experience to run the country However, there are 2 other stories not getting the same exposure. The first is the rise of the Greens under Polanski which could be as impressive as Reform. The second is that the SNP have now got their act together. Swinney gets far too little publicity .....especially given the often racist coverage of the former SNP leader.
 
This is not true and what they want people to believe so they can go solely after X. It is why Liz Kendall's announcement and the changes hardly mentioned X itself or Grok as they know full well that this is something they can all do.

The honest answer is that while they can all do this they each use different guardrails and groks are not working as well as they are supposed to but with all of them people are trying to do all sorts to beat the guardrails and "trick" the AI into doing things they don't want to.

ChatGPT's policy is pretty much identical to the policy that Grok had originally before they added a layer of only allowing access to people that were paid up and identifiable..................the policy that the politicians and commentariat screamed was not enough.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has policies and safety mechanisms in place to prohibit the creation of non-consensual explicit imagery, including "undressing" people in photos without their consent. OpenAI takes action against users who generate such content, including account bans.

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They all have "guardrails" to try and stop this sort of thing. Groks have been found to be weaker on certain aspects, Takes time to sort that out but the others have weaknesses too yet the narrative doesn't suit so they ignore that.
 
Ian Thumwood said:
This was the position outlined in the interviews on Radio Four this evening. There was also a consensus that Badenoch had got her act together since the Tory conference and the subsequent PMQs.


I was very surprised by this as i felt the public thought she continued to be hopeless. It is shocking how much coverage Farage gets in the media albeit i recognise that he is a big story. I feel that Reform will ultimately replace the Tories but they have insufficient experience to run the country However, there are 2 other stories not getting the same exposure. The first is the rise of the Greens under Polanski which could be as impressive as Reform. The second is that the SNP have now got their act together. Swinney gets far too little publicity .....especially given the often racist coverage of the former SNP leader.
Click to expand...
I do wonder where you get your news and info/opinions from as you must read different things to me :D

Badenoch was and is very popular within Tory circles despite the noise about her being ineffective especially amongst the MPs and their cliques. In polling in the previous leadership election amongst the membership she was polling No1 and beat all the other contenders in head to head polling. The MPs got rid of her and presented the membership with Sunak vs Truss, which were 3rd and 4th in popularity!

Again the last time round she won all head to heads yet the MPs still tried to eliminate her and make it a Cleverley v Jenrick play off.

Since she has been leader the whole blob of them has been banging on about weaknesses in PMQs when the public don't care about PMQs, The bubble does and thinks the public do too! They have banged on about all sorts of weaknesses and "no policies" when she was having to pull a party of MPs that still think she'll be out before the next GE and wholesale resist getting behind their leader!

This will make her stronger but the Tories fell apart for not being Tories. Not because they wanted them to go full Farage but just stop being Centrist Globalist shills and continuing the Blair era movement of money out of the tax purse into the hands of the rich and cronies and jobs for the boys...........while telling the public they are all liars.

The comparison to the Greens under Polanski gets more coverage but your sense it is as impressive as Reform is a bit laughable. Farage has been a long story in the making. Reform is the lates Farage front. It was a story as a protest argument but moving into No1 contender is literally Big Big news! Polanski is a 6 month old story and dependent on which polling you watch he has moved a small % protest party from single digits to just into double digits? There is potential for it to be a reform vs Green No1 and No2 play off in 2029 but if they can't pull well ahead of Labour and Lib Dems then they will fall backward closing in on the GE because people will move to wherever the potential winners are so they need clear distance ahead of Labour or people will go back to Labour against Reform. Reform have made that clear distance ahead of Tories and so they could well pull Tory votes closer to the GE rather than the other way round.

Post above about Tories needing to tack to centrist Libertarian Neo lib area is way off the money. That is not the zeitgeist here. Tories had a chance when they took over from Blair to break away from the centrist blah blah, ignore the populace, bow down to the internationlist technocrats policies but they chose to continue them. That is why they went bust and despite a few last chances of people hoping for change people finally gave up with them ad voted (or didn't vote at all) to get change as always with the other side..........and the other side still wants to continue pushing money to technocracies and ripping off the public in general so they are doomed very early on.

SNP have not got their act together. The reality is they have zero competition in Scotland now. Labour's mini revival up there is well and truly smashed up now Starmer's been in a year and half and The Tory vote has crumbled. It isn't anything to do with SNP themselves. Its all to do with all the others.

So Badenoch will not improve her position much because moving back to the Blair/Cameron area is not appealing to 2025+ voters. Centrism is more and more hated across the Western World. She is penned in by Farage spreading from the right towards the centre and while she could overlap a little bit the blob will spin that as her going far right or extremist when the reality is that is just centre right and is where the Tories should have been all the time. Centre to centre right and not centre left to centre which is where they occupied trying to do the Blair thing.

Theresa May and Kier Starmer are pretty much identical on a lot of their stances. That is the problem the centrists have!
 
Oh, and it is laughable that Farage can spin the Jenrick thing because Jenrick is a remainer tory wet Blairite that threw his toys out the pram when his Bestie Sunak didn't give him the Home Secretary gig and suddenly "resigned on principle" rebranding himself as a hard right option! He can't even remember half the stories he tells of how his "awakening" happened and often gets them wrong. Robert Generic is often joked about by other Tories as "a man for all season" and that is not meant as a compliment.

However the way the world is this nobody has managed to make himself a big name and getting big names can be spun as a big positive headline which those that could easily expose by going after Jenrick's fake conversion but they are all so useless that they are attacking what Farage said about Jenrick instead. Farage is teflon. Jenrick is cheap plastic pots from poundland. If they went after Jenrick being a fake they would win quickly but they can't stop thinking they can take Farage down by going after Farage.

Getting Jenrick shouldn't be a win for Reform but because of the way the useless press and the media go after Farage "the man" it will end up being a massive win.
 
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The media seem so sure that Jenrick's defection is a great thing for Reform and a terrible thing for the Conservatives. The BBC were asking Badenoch how she felt on 'this terrible day for the Conservatives' and questioning how bad it was for them losing one of their leading lights.

Am I on another planet? I am listening to this thinking this is probably the best day of Badenoch's career, she has just got rid of her main rival in the party, while the Reform link to the failed last government gets stronger? Jenrick is notoriously ambitious, slimy and duplicitous, as well as fairly incompetent at actual delivery (the former immigration minister ffs). I would be amazed if he doesnt end up being a massive pain in the arse for Farage.

Today Badenoch is more secure as Tory leader than she has ever been with the Tory Party slowly starting to creep up the polls and she looks stronger for sacking him first, I do not see how this is anything but good for her, even if I REALLY don't like or rate her (although i'd take her over Reform, just).
 
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I'm not an extremely well informed voter in that I don't have a deep understanding of all the parties main players / agendas and so on (like a lot of people I assume) and due to varying stages of my career involving travelling I wasn't always around to vote, but surely any sane person can see that Farage has zero experience governing and whilst he's hoovering up party defectors it's not really changing that perception.

Conservatives can say "we not the same party anymore" as most of the bad ones have gone Reform and improve their standing by virtue of being seen to try to change.
Labour can just about say they that have delivered "some" things

The main concern I have is that a lot of people will be like my parents (and my wife's parents) in that they vote for the personality and like with them all voting leave on brexit they believe the media spin on a small issue that is blown out of proportion.

Next time they are all voting reform to "get rid of the foreigners" (sometimes I try to bring them into the real world but it falls on old deaf ears) but when I challenge them on what else reform are going to do to improve their lives (pointing out that they are actually now worse off since we left the EU too) they don't actually have any idea on what Reform's message actually is.
 
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ImpSaint said:
I do wonder where you get your news and info/opinions from as you must read different things to me :D

Badenoch was and is very popular within Tory circles despite the noise about her being ineffective especially amongst the MPs and their cliques. In polling in the previous leadership election amongst the membership she was polling No1 and beat all the other contenders in head to head polling. The MPs got rid of her and presented the membership with Sunak vs Truss, which were 3rd and 4th in popularity!

Again the last time round she won all head to heads yet the MPs still tried to eliminate her and make it a Cleverley v Jenrick play off.

Since she has been leader the whole blob of them has been banging on about weaknesses in PMQs when the public don't care about PMQs, The bubble does and thinks the public do too! They have banged on about all sorts of weaknesses and "no policies" when she was having to pull a party of MPs that still think she'll be out before the next GE and wholesale resist getting behind their leader!

This will make her stronger but the Tories fell apart for not being Tories. Not because they wanted them to go full Farage but just stop being Centrist Globalist shills and continuing the Blair era movement of money out of the tax purse into the hands of the rich and cronies and jobs for the boys...........while telling the public they are all liars.

The comparison to the Greens under Polanski gets more coverage but your sense it is as impressive as Reform is a bit laughable. Farage has been a long story in the making. Reform is the lates Farage front. It was a story as a protest argument but moving into No1 contender is literally Big Big news! Polanski is a 6 month old story and dependent on which polling you watch he has moved a small % protest party from single digits to just into double digits? There is potential for it to be a reform vs Green No1 and No2 play off in 2029 but if they can't pull well ahead of Labour and Lib Dems then they will fall backward closing in on the GE because people will move to wherever the potential winners are so they need clear distance ahead of Labour or people will go back to Labour against Reform. Reform have made that clear distance ahead of Tories and so they could well pull Tory votes closer to the GE rather than the other way round.

Post above about Tories needing to tack to centrist Libertarian Neo lib area is way off the money. That is not the zeitgeist here. Tories had a chance when they took over from Blair to break away from the centrist blah blah, ignore the populace, bow down to the internationlist technocrats policies but they chose to continue them. That is why they went bust and despite a few last chances of people hoping for change people finally gave up with them ad voted (or didn't vote at all) to get change as always with the other side..........and the other side still wants to continue pushing money to technocracies and ripping off the public in general so they are doomed very early on.

SNP have not got their act together. The reality is they have zero competition in Scotland now. Labour's mini revival up there is well and truly smashed up now Starmer's been in a year and half and The Tory vote has crumbled. It isn't anything to do with SNP themselves. Its all to do with all the others.

So Badenoch will not improve her position much because moving back to the Blair/Cameron area is not appealing to 2025+ voters. Centrism is more and more hated across the Western World. She is penned in by Farage spreading from the right towards the centre and while she could overlap a little bit the blob will spin that as her going far right or extremist when the reality is that is just centre right and is where the Tories should have been all the time. Centre to centre right and not centre left to centre which is where they occupied trying to do the Blair thing.

Theresa May and Kier Starmer are pretty much identical on a lot of their stances. That is the problem the centrists have!
Click to expand...
What a load of rabble.

Centrist candidates collectively have won the most votes at every single election for the past 30 years comfortably.

What people largely object to is the 'socially progressive/ woke' idealogies that have been enforced and the next election could go to reform in protest of that. But they won't be in control for long. It's a house with more back stabbing than the late Roman Republic.

But there's a lot of time between now and May 2029.
 
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