[Youngian]

An encyclopedic knowledge of Jazz and likes brandy are Ken Clarke’s hinterlands so not eclectic but at least has some.
It’s still hard gauge if Boris Johnson has any interests outside of the game of politics beyond ligging and poking his pecker in some sorry trash cans.

[Andy McDandy]

Judging by his taste in films and TV - Gladiator, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings - he likes big brash simplistic things that support the "great men" theory of history, are vaguely militaristic and anglocentric, and have regular fight scenes to stop him getting bored.

[Spoonman]

An encyclopedic knowledge of Jazz and likes brandy are Ken Clarke’s hinterlands so not eclectic but at least has some.
It’s still hard gauge if Boris Johnson has any interests outside of the game of politics beyond ligging and poking his pecker in some sorry trash cans.

That's not the worst euphemism I've ever heard!

[Youngian]

That's not the worst euphemism I've ever heard!

Got it from Kathy Bates as a veteran political operator in Primary Colors. Used to describe the extra curricular activities of John Travolta playing presidential candidate Jack ‘Bill Clinton’ Stanton.

[slilley]

I'm currently unemployed and the way they go on it's as easy as just walking into a building and you'll be hired on the spot when it is absolutely not the case. Employers are really picky, even at the arse end of the jobs market. They seem to want unicorns and pay the minimum amount for them. Warehouse, customer service, retail, if you haven't got recent experience or have gaps on your CV they don't want to know and that's even before you get the chance of an interview. Even the agencies around my area are quiet as a major distribution centre shutdown just after xmas and another moved a major contract to another centre so there's a glut of temp labour. I sometimes look on the property sites and the number of places where I worked just a couple of years ago that are now sitting empty is boggling. And these aren't small warehouses, we're talking places that would easily have around a couple of hundred working in them. Jobs market is proper fucked.

I have been between jobs twice since 2020, the first time was due to redundancy, the second was a job I left of my own volition due to family pressures whch fortunately have now resolved themselves. I was fortunate in that I work in an area where there is some demand for my skills, in fact in the most recent spell of being between jobs whilst I was applying for things, at times I was having agencies ring me every day wanting to put myself forward for this that and the other. Some of it I was not completely suited to but I said yes all the same and ended up with a number of interviews which I used as good practice. I now have a part time job, at the other side of 55 I thought it was an opportunity to wind down a bit, develop the writing career a bit more and take out some of the work based stresses. I was offered a public sector job which required vetting and 9 weeks after filling out all the forms and giving them almost my complete life history I am still waiting to hear anything further.

[davidjay]

Public sector security checks are appalingly slow. On a wider note, when I was looking earlier this year I found plenty of jobs available available for minimum wage or a bit higher but once you got to much above £12.50 an hour/£25,000 they require extensive and specialised experience. The days when, for example, you could move from working in an engineering company's accounts office to a house builders' because it's still adding up figures are long gone. Now you'd have to have worked in exactly the same type of house builders.

[Andy McDandy]

Main reason for this being that in both public and private sectors, training budgets have been ripped to shreds. Add on the trend of compartmentalising workers so everyone knows one task really well (because generalists/training up people in other people's jobs is seen as inefficient, at least by morons who really don't understand Lean management theory beyond "cut costs (up front)")*, what you get is a situation where employers want someone who can slip into a job straight away, hit the ground running, and have a seamless transfer.

*A lot of people translate Lean as "slim down, get rid of waste, cut costs". Which it is - to a point. For instance you can get rid of massive storage and inventory units if you have a constant and reliable supply chain. If your staff can access work-based systems and update things from phones/tablets, you won't need so much back office space. BUT you still need to build in tolerances and contingencies if anything goes wrong - not necessarily have them in place, but accessible (such as the number for a good temp agency rather than surplus staff, or having people trained to cover).

[Youngian]

I should reflect on that while gazing out upon the Mississippi one evening.

[satnav]

I wonder why Liz Truss, Suella Braverman and Iain Duncan Smit fail to make it onto his list.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Bozo gets a pass too.

Isn't it about time he got over John Major? Who was actually pretty capable (if grim) when not being dicked about by proto-Carswells.

[Tubby Isaacs]

No great surprise, given he'll be 63 and would almost certainly lose his seat, but one of the sane ones walks.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Interesting theory from Paul Waugh here. It was quite odd that they made these changes, which are unpopular, and won't kick in before the election. Lisa Nandy was commendably honest that they might not completely reverse them if they were going to make their housebuilding targets. So in effect the Tories were, quite literally, doing Labour's dirty work. So, yes, odd.

But "dividing line" makes very little sense to me. The dividing line to most people will be "Tories want to put more crap in rivers, Labour don't". Quite why this is a killer line v Starrmer. Does anybody much care about him changing views in the last 5 years who isn't a "no" in the first place? I keep reading that Labour's going to be fucked by apathy from Labour supporters, but that rather overlooks that it's not the election yet. When there is, there will presumably be a manifesto with some popular policies in it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Philosopher King, Nick Timothy, really has his tail up.

Great reaction BTL. "You lost your majority to Jeremy Corbyn" is among the kinder takes. Plus even these two opening bullet points are bollocks. Nobody is saying the "West take 100m refugees" (over half of these are displaced within their own borders) and by his own logic, Poland should have taken all the Ukrainians who couldn't afford direct flights further West. Someone cleverly asks him in if he supports all the boat arrivals being kept in Kent.

[Youngian]

He uses ‘moral duty’ to sustain the myth that refugees should claim in the first safe countries they reach.

If that had already happened and there were no boats, would refugees even be an issue on the political radar?

That with already record levels of net migration the answer to illegal immigration is to accommodate it by making it legal, and to accept migrants we would not accept through our regular system.

[Tubby Isaacs]

What a liar. Asylum isn’t illegal immigration.

[Andy McDandy]

Nice piece in today's Indy, Ian Dunt saying that Starmer's plan (which is basically "have an asylum and immigration system") seems to be really angering all the right people.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Neil O'Brien, who is one of the brighter ones, was talking about the "secondary effects". He didn't explain how this was going to produce 100,000 per year. And if it did, surely we could cut the cost by processing in a timely manner.

[Andy McDandy]

As said before, a population increase of 100,000 is something a G7 country ought to be able to accommodate year on year. Any pressure on infrastructure, the NHS, schools etc is due to failure of government to maintain them, and would be happening regardless of who was arriving here.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Actual former Cabinet Minister.

[Abernathy]

Actual former Cabinet Minister.

Interesting , this. If Corbyn had still been leader, I think this kind of bollocks would have had quite a bit of traction. With Starmer, and the work he has done to re-position the party, I really don’t think it will.