DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

thank fuck nobody in the PLP has got any dodgy ties to Newscorp waiting to come out

that's true, Mark. and he was pretty good on today prog this morning. i just don't have much faith in their ability to make it stick.

his point re: hunt as firewall is pretty sharp

This drubbing might be the best pretext the Libs have for escaping the coalition, if they're brave enough.

first election night i can remember where i cdn't even be fucked to stay up and watch results

So the Tories get a massive kicking and attribute it to being "not right-wing enough"... uh huh

Might help them shore up their core support. Internal dissent is probably going off the scale at the moment.

It'll be interesting to see how they square that with Boris' inevitable victory in London though.

so basically they're saying "we need to be more racist"

Cameron's only tolerated by the Tory rump because he's popular and successful. If he stops being popular and successful, and starts losing safe Conservative seats, he has to throw a few bones to the crazy old people who actually make up the bulk of the party. It's going to make them more unpopular with everyone else, which is a good thing.

At the same time, while Cameron's driving to the right, Boris will hold on to a major prize by being a centrist, dividing the traditionalists and reformers even more. It's a recipe for complete disarray.

The Tories are *eating* David Cameron...

I presume at LibDem HQ they're having a whip-round to buy a Waterstone's voucher for their one remaining voter

1231: In one Edinburgh ward a Lib Dem candidate has failed to pick up more first preference votes than Professor Pongoo, an independent candidate who dresses in a six-foot penguin costume. And with nine of 58 seats declared in the city, it is clear the Lib Dem vote is down overall.

i <3 penguins and might well vote for one over any candidate

Yes but you hate comedy and some sub-Raving Loony guy in a bird suit surely qualifies as "comedy".

oh no i didn't mean him, i meant if an actual real penguin was a candidate

it is really tough to be better than a penguin

https://p.twimg.com/AsDLPzICMAA06UC.jpg

but then that penguin venturing out into nowhere in 'Encounters at the End of the World' is a pretty good Lib Dems analogy.

is professor pongoo a real professor though?

also has anybody stood for Lemon Party yet?

"More on the news that UKIP's candidate for Mayor of London, Lawrence Webb, was mistakenly listed on the ballot paper as Fresh Choice for London. It should have read "UKIP: A Fresh Choice for London". A "furious" Nigel Farage has admitted that the fault was at UKIP's end - they forgot to put their party name on the nomination paper."

might get more voters without the UKIP name?

Disappointed they didn't accidentally put "A French Choice For London". That'd really have wound them up.

All the literature I'd had through the door had Fresh Choice For London on it, not UKIP, I even laughed that it was a stupid idea because their voters wouldn't be able to find who to vote for, so it's not like the dozy twats didn't have time to notice it before now.

:-) xp

Ed Millibong

http://i.imgur.com/C89zO.jpg

VG

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-17982027

The "previous comment" she made was even worse ("if you don't like it go back to where you came from") to someone with an Asian name.

i saw that comment alluded to but not actually quoted in the news story - disgusting.

ah c'mon kids some of ilx's most hardcore socialist's are repping for these oh hang on

btw i'm not sure i've been sarcastic enough i hope you cunts die cheers

cant believe some poujadist fuckheid from bournemouth expressed reactionary views on twitter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/may/25/michael-gove-jewish-exam-question

yes because to explain is to understand is to sympathise is to approve of. fuck this ignoramus, this intellectual maggot.

sorry. old story. been away.

question cd probly be worded less o_Oly

i'm sure it's pretty clear in the context of the syllabus. i find the kneejerk reaction of horror against "understanding" any kind of transgression, of any suggestion of an alternative to blind condemnation and punishment even more o_O tbh.

not defending the responses but i know from my own experience of things that our Joel tells me that the RE syllabus is often worded quite tendentiously. at GCSE level accounting for a prejudice is not really the same as dissecting it

like yes don't pretend anti-semitism doesn't exist but "list the greatest hits of anti-semitism" is a bit weird as a question in that context

The question “plants suggestions and implies ideas that shouldn’t be instilled into students”.

honestly i just despair at this garden-of-eden knowledge is sinful bullshit.

that was a rabbi not gove btw.

Front page of the BBC site today = u-turn on charity tax, Jeremy Hunt at Leveson, Coulson charged with perjury = such a pleasing structure of interconnected disasters.

With all the other hateful stuff they're doing, the government's approach to immigration hasn't really been scrutinised enough recently. Along with demolishing the student visa sector, this has to go down as one of the most stupidly spiteful things on their agenda:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/08/immigration-rules-couples-stark-choice?CMP=twt_gu

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jun/11/david-cameron-daughter-behind-pub?newsfeed=true

hopefully the government will introduce compulsory parenting classes for these sort of dysfunctional wastrels

Didn't see that immigration thing before, that is absolutely hateful. Presumably it would fall afoul o the same "right to family life" clause of the human rights act that the Tories are trying to dismantle so they can deport foreign lag once they have done their time.

Sadly, it appears that it doesn't fall foul of the right to family life clause - it's something that was tested when they introduced the English-language requirements to get married.

I wonder if it could be interpreted as discriminatory on gender though, given the disparity in average salary between the sexes.

Vote Liberal Democrat

the immigration thing is one of those things you can't quite believe can actually happen - it almost reads like DON'T MARRY OUTSIDE OF YOUR NATION.

(UNLESS YOU'RE RICH)

Poor people, don't you dare fall in love until you can afford it. I doubt this will ever become law.

it does seem like more of a headline-grabber than a well-thought-through plan: a coded message to Express readers, that the government's looking out for them by targeting those much-discussed immigrants from the subcontinent who bring their whole families here and live off the state and don't even bother to learn the language and etc etc etc, even though in actual fact migrants to the UK aren't eligible for benefits.

otoh, brooke magnanti made an interesting point about it here

The key to what these proposals really mean is in the election pledge: Cameron promised to reduce net migration. That's not the number of migrants total, that's the difference between migrants arriving and British citizens leaving. Sorry to break it to those who think the country is "packed full" or "under siege": the government is not interested in decreasing migration per se. They'd be as happy if immigration increased, as long as loads of Britons left. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mail readers.

Attacking the family route is the easiest way to do this. If a married couple cannot settle, not only has a migrant left, so has a UK citizen. This gets net migration down twice as fast as controlling other visas. The approach is crafted to appear successful to the rightwing without producing meaningful change for anyone.

If this law existed when I met my wife, we wouldn't have been able to live here. tbh, kinda ambivalent about that.