There was an event yesterday – you might have heard. I have avoided quoting any of the papers but if you want to read them, please see here.
In other news:
Local elections
Guardian
Labour is making dramatic progress in winning back pro-Brexit voters across the country as the coalition of support for the Tories built by Boris Johnson collapses, according to detailed analysis of Thursday’s local election results.
Figures from the BBC’s “key wards” data, obtained by the Observer, show support for Keir Starmer’s party was up by seven points compared with 2021 in the most heavily pro-leave wards.
The data also shows that while the Tories were down 2.5 points in the most pro-remain wards, their vote was down even more – by 5.5 points – in the most pro-leave wards.
Senior Labour figures and leading academics said the data showed that the link between voting for Brexit and voting for the Tories is weakening – further encouraging Labour strategists to believe they can take back seats across the “red wall” and are on course to win the next general election.
Robert Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, who was part of the BBC’s results and analysis team, said that in the 2021 local elections there had been a very close correlation between those who voted Tory and those who had voted to leave the EU in red wall areas.
“Voting leave was a very strong predictor of voting Tory. Now it is fading. Our statistical modelling shows it is much weaker now. We can say people are voting less in line with their Brexit preferences than they were a couple of years ago.”
Stephen Fisher, professor of political sociology at Oxford University, who was also on the BBC results and analysis team, agreed that the connection between people voting Tory and those who voted leave had become looser, particularly since 2021.
In Thursday’s poll Labour gained 536 seats and took control of another 22 councils as it became the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002.
In a terrible day for Rishi Sunak’s party, the Tories lost more than 1,000 seats – exceeding a figure that deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden had cited last weekend as, in effect, a worst-case scenario. The Liberal Democrats and Greens also made large gains.
Conservative Party
Sun
SENIOR Tories are demanding immediate tax cuts to save the party after last week’s local elections mauling.
They called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to act “within days” to help kickstart his fightback against Labour in time for next year’s general election.
The Conservatives lost more than 1,000 seats including crunch battleground councils in parts of the Red Wall.
Tory MP John Redwood told the Sun on Sunday: “The Prime Minister should announce tax cuts on Tuesday — straight after the Coronation bank holiday.
“He has got to get on with it. He has got to cut taxes and promote growth.”
An ex-Cabinet minister said: “On the doorstep people are clear they want a Conservative party that is a tax-cutting, growth-getting freedom-loving party.
“They want us to stand up for our core values.”
MP Justin Tomlinson, in the key battleground of Swindon where the council went from Tory to Labour, said the slew of defeats must be a “wake-up call”.
He added: “There is no goodwill in the tank from voters. We have got to give people positive reasons to vote Conservative.”
Another Tory MP said: “We need to revert to the Conservative brand and that means tax cuts and building more housing.”
Independent
Rishi Sunak has a “narrow path to victory” in next year’s general election but faces a “race against time”, according to a polling expert.
The prime minister has brought the Conservatives “out of the deepest part of the valley” but has “a lot of mountain to climb”, the boss of a political forecasting company has said.
Martin Baxter, CEO of Electoral Calculus, told The Independent that the prime minister has 18 months to “whittle away at Labour’s lead” and he must make progress on his five key pledges.
“If they can get Labour’s lead down to five or less, Labour does not have a majority anymore, and that depends on the government making progress with its delivery,” he added.
While he said “a path to victory is there”, Mr Baxter stressed that it is “pretty narrow”.
Housing
Mail
Tories rowing over the housing crisis following the local election losses were last night told to ‘be brave’ and build ‘new towns’ to solve the problem.
Senior Tory MP Craig Mackinlay called for the radical plan, saying that Kent alone could take two completely new towns each comprising 30,000 homes.
There was bitter Tory infighting after last week’s dire local election results, with ex-Minister Kelly Tolhurst suggesting that Labour’s triumph in ousting the Tories in Medway was partly down to local anger at ‘unrealistic housing targets’.
But fellow Tory Sir Charles Walker hit back by saying the Government should be ‘putting up the homes that the young and aspiring want to buy’.
Sir Charles, MP for Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, added that his area ‘builds houses and we returned all of our councillors on Thursday’.
The fierce internal Tory debate came after Sir Keir Starmer vowed to take on ‘nimbyism’ (not in my backyard) opposition to new house-building by saying a Labour government would re-impose binding local house-building targets scrapped by Rishi Sunak after a huge Tory backbench revolt.
However, South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay told The Mail on Sunday that to tackle the housing crisis, politicians had to bite the bullet and accept that a series of new towns was the answer.
He said adding houses ‘piecemeal’ to towns was one of the reasons ‘we are losing elections’, saying: ‘We should be brave enough to deliver much needed housing numbers in a different way and build ambitious new towns with the proper infrastructure and facilities instead of adding to existing conurbations which simply add to local pressures and are universally opposed.’
Kent could take two new towns, he said, but suggested there was potentially more scope in Sussex and Surrey. He also insisted that farmland instead of precious ‘green belt’ land could be used.
AI
Guardian
Last Monday an eminent, elderly British scientist lobbed a grenade into the febrile anthill of researchers and corporations currently obsessed with artificial intelligence or AI (aka, for the most part, a technology called machine learning). The scientist was Geoffrey Hinton, and the bombshell was the news that he was leaving Google, where he had been doing great work on machine learning for the last 10 years, because he wanted to be free to express his fears about where the technology he had played a seminal role in founding was heading.
To say that this was big news would be an epic understatement. The tech industry is a huge, excitable beast that is occasionally prone to outbreaks of “irrational exuberance”, ie madness. One recent bout of it involved cryptocurrencies and a vision of the future of the internet called “Web3”, which an astute young blogger and critic, Molly White, memorably describes as “an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet”.
We are currently in the grip of another outbreak of exuberance triggered by “Generative AI” – chatbots, large language models (LLMs) and other exotic artefacts enabled by massive deployment of machine learning – which the industry now regards as the future for which it is busily tooling up.
Recently, more than 27,000 people – including many who are knowledgeable about the technology – became so alarmed about the Gadarene rush under way towards a machine-driven dystopia that they issued an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of the technology. “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth,” it said, “and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.”
Guns
Star
Gun crime is soaring in some of our biggest cities, the Daily Star Sunday can reveal.
Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Leeds have all seen a surge in firearms offences in the past decade.
The rise is linked to ruthless drug gangs being willing to use weapons to settle scores – and gun runners feeding demand by smuggling in weapons. Only London, where the number of shootings has fallen, bucked the trend.
A source close to the trade in illegal weapons said: “There’s a network of major criminal gangs in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Birmingham and parts of the North East – interlinked criminals who often do bits of work together – who can access military grade hardware.
“I’m talking about submachine guns, automatic weapons, Glock semi-automatic pistols – even explosives and grenades.
“Gangs have become more violent and ruthless. As a result, gangland armourers – a lot of them ex-military – are fuelling the demand by bringing them in from Eastern Europe, America, Northern Ireland.”
Merseyside, Greater Manchester, South Yorks, West Yorks, West Midlands, Northants and Cleveland all outstrip London per head of population for crimes involving firearms.
Star
An AK-47 and a high-powered machine gun are among a cache of missing weapons being hunted by the Army.
Two Glock handguns – favoured in gangland killings – have also vanished from military bases, sparking fears they could have fallen into the wrong hands.
And hundreds of rounds of ammunition have been nicked by soldiers amid deep concerns they’re being sold to gangs.
The Daily Star Sunday can reveal police have launched undercover operations to nail gun runners selling parts and ‘ammo’ believed to be stolen from army bases.
A Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Defence revealed a GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun) capable of ‘taking down walls’ was stolen last year
Two guns – a Glock 43X and a deactivated AK-47 – were also lost and have yet to be found.
In 2021, two deactivated SA80 assault rifles were stolen while a Glock 17 pistol and another GMPG went missing.
Nuclear power plant
Express
The International Atomic Energy Agency has voiced its concern as Russian forces evacuate civilians from the Ukrainian town of Enerhodar close to Zaporizhzhia, home of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
Fears are growing for the largest nuclear plant in Europe with experts warning that the site in Ukraine becoming “increasingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous”.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has voiced his concern as Russian occupation forces evacuate civilians from the Ukrainian town of Enerhodar close to the Zaporizhzhia plant.
The evacuation comes ahead of an expected Ukrainian counter-offensive, although nuclear staff are staying on-site.
The IAEA statement said that “while operating staff remain at the site, Director General Rafael Grossi expressed deep concern about the increasingly tense, stressful, and challenging conditions for personnel and their families”.
It said the IAEA experts present at the plant had “received information” that the announced evacuation of residents from the nearby town of Enerhodar, where most plant staff live, had started.
I take massive optimism from these results. They indicate to me ( Tho’ I’m often wrong ) that voters are not impressed by anybody at all, and that a huge gap is being ignored as though it didn’t exist. It’s the same reasoning as ignoring the affect that The Brexit Party abandonment from Farage had on the Red Wall. MPs now talk as though it was their and their parties wonderfulness got them the seat. It was in fact disgraceful dishonesty by Farage, and he might do it again. The pressure from the establishment to do so, will be immense . So, A new party it must be. OR
NewUKIP can make the Constitutional changes, percentages, must change from 95%, Proper democracy must be practised IF you can claim it, OR change and make it into an advisory committee. That is what is morally claimed, so do it, and quickly please, so you can increase your numbers soon enough to re-energise for the election. Anything otherwise indicates Self glorification. ( Which means no glory at all ) above your country. .
It’d be a hell of a fight in the Potteries. And winnable..Done right it can spread, . But in fact everywhere including other countries.
Britain is more important to the world than we know. ( + and ) shrugging off the yoke of an overmighty and corrupt ( IF not criminal ) UniParty would cheer up the world to actually do the basic steps and correct things in case there actually is global warming. And if there isn’t, the world really needs a competent and wholesome and honest cleaner.
TG Spokes……..the real winners in the local elections were the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, be under no allusion about that. Labour under that bumbling numpty Starmer think they are heading for Downing Street, but the swing wasn’t sufficient to enable that, and I believe that they will just fall away Besides which if they are going to form the next government shouldn’t they be taking control of councils like Hartlepool which they spectacularly failed to do and which went to No Overall Control. Personally I think the main benefactors of a Conservative Party collapse in vote in the South East at least will be the Liberal Democrats, and I believe that there will be 100 plus of their MP’s in the House of Commons after the next election. That in itself would put paid to Starmer’s party electoral ambitions in 2025. I hope you are not insinuating that the New UKIP will be Reform UK because that party at present is run by politically naive individuals who don’t have a clue how to run an effective political party. They have been firmly rejected by the electorate and the writing is on the wall insofar as their future is concerned. Insofar as Farage is concerned, he is not worth worrying about any longer and I and many others have totally given up on him. Now I won’t even listen to the tripe that he spouts on his GB News programme. I am afraid to say he has become a bore, and says the same thing time and again. The other losers in the local elections were UKIP who lost another 22 councilors and had none elected. If this doesn’t make them sit up and take stock of where they are at present, I don’t know what will. However their deputy leader did give an honest and frank post election address, and the party really needs to start looking for a new leader to take them forward. I will remain with UKIP as I think in the long term will present the best chance for those on the centre right.
Colin You are ,of course , correct, but I’m not going to explain…
Craig McKinley is a total moron for saying Kent can take two new towns of 30,000 houses each. We cannot simply keep on building on the green belt and on prime farmland otherwise we are going to reach a point in the not too distant future where we will not be able to feed our burgeoning population. The answer to the lack of housing is to cut the numbers of people coming into this country through illegal immigration, as all those hundreds of thousands need housing. He should know better than coming out with this sort of crap, as he once part of the UK Independence Party and a deputy leader, which adopted a totally different view of the world. Setting that apart however he was luck to have got away with the electoral mismanagement in 2015 which helped to deprive Nigel Farage of that seat by 3000 votes. Kent used to be called the ‘Garden of England, which is no longer the case and part of the blame for this has to be laid at the feet of the utterly inept and incompetent party of which he is a member these days, and what is that party called…er it used to be called the Conservative and Unionist Party, but nobody knows what it stands for these days and that includes some of its members. Still never mind, McKinley and his ilk will be looking for another job in a years time. And good riddance I say.
Spot on Colin.
Just returned from a party in my street. It was better attended than I expected. A modest affair in our small street but attended by a television crew from Denmark. On being asked why come to our little bash – how did they even know about it? – I was told ours was ‘cosy’. My neighbours are from Canada, Italy, China, Denmark (must be how the TV crew were tipped off), Kuwait and similar and there were some hijab wearing women from Lebanon and Iraq who lived nearby, The food was a variety of cuisines – dim sum from the asian lady – though the Italian woman brought actual coronation quiche that she had made. Quite good as it happens.
The coronation was an excuse for a party for these people, not a celebration of a monarchy that binds or of a new Caroline age. I suspect most of them are in London for work related reasons and will one day return home. However, I cannot return home to England. My land is occupied. albeit benignly in my street by people who are pleasant enough. Other cultures continue that people can go home to. I can only watch the continual erosion of mine as I move between vestiges of it that are left. Those of you outside of the metropolis are lucky (for now) if you feel some historic continuity where you are. I appear to be the last Englishman in my street. I spoke to many neighbours for the first time – to talk to them you have to see them – and I may have been an object of fascination for them. All quite enjoyable.
But, once English ritual and tradition is dissolved, once our home is just one large hotel of different cultures, what will bring neighbours together? Once, staying at The Phoenicia Hotel in Malta, I was surprised to discover the manager held champagne soirees on Wednesday evenings to bring guests together. A nice touch that worked. Whether our eventual hotel manager in open borders Britain – Keir Starmer heading a republic? – will urge us to hold street parties (to celebrate what I wonder) remains to be seen.
Jelly and Ice Cream, Lemonade and Pass the Parcel. Yippee. On second thoughts, no I don’t think so!!!
“though the Italian woman brought actual coronation quiche that she had made. Quite good as it happens”
Sorry SY, how could you? in my book.
“The only good kwitch is a dead kwitch”
I won`t say `I cannot stand the stuff, as I cannot, but to me, it is like eating tasteless goo encased in tasteless pastry,
I find far more satisfaction in eating just plain scrambled egg on buttered toast (seasoned with a little salt and a modicum of white pepper), than in any kwitch forced or inveigled on me
Housing:
Why not limit the demand by controlling immigration? Obviously that doesn’t suit the government agenda.
“Labour is making dramatic progress…”
So dramatic that I read of one candidate that did not increase his vote from last time when he came second, but this time won by a large margin. Some seats were won by as little a 14% of the local electorate. Anyone spinning this as progress rather apathy tells you all you need to know about the speaker.
John Ellwood writing in Conservative Woman: “As I walked through the soggy detritus left by the crowd, I could not resist the feeling that I had just witnessed a long-standing play at the end of its run that had begun to perform to dwindling audiences. The band played well, the costumes were impressive and the lines well rehearsed, but the players were aware that the plot was hackneyed, the songs were over familiar and the artifice had faded.” Today’s street parties (in comparison to 1953), the paucity of bunting (across London at least), will measure the extent to which audiences have dwindled.
The long-standing play has been running since 973 AD. We should be celebrating that no other country has a similarly long running play. The actor currently playing the lead role is not the point.
Theres quite a few. Japan has the oldest.
Maybe Mad Green King Charles 111 like Keir Starmer would prefer to be acting in the greater play going on in Davos.
Surely right Jake.
Most of the media still inhabiting some sort of parallel universe that had nobody interested in the ‘event’ and Starmer on course to win the next general election based on local election turnouts that were as low as 20% in some places , yeah OK.
A 1 % Reduction in VAT from 20 % to “19 % would produce an instant reduction in Cost of Living of approx. the same. Scrapping any of the VAT’s would reduce costs of bureaucracy, Thersa Mays invented industries etc. other taxes, etc + others, by FAR more than the actual rate reduction was.. To say nothing about VAT corruption and scams