timrollpickering.bsky.social
Just a random dull person who never sees the point in writing something elaborate for these.
23 posts
13 followers
18 following
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Is it going to result in the most beautiful space in the White House car park?
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I recall that Corbyn's chances of winning could be seen in polls even before he was nominated in 2015, though the only live link I can find is me rather jokingly calling for Conservative MPs to step in and get him on the ballot paper just before Toby Young began #Tories4Corbyn x.com/timrollpicke...
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There was also a significant block of voters who supported full independence, out of both the UK and the EU, a combination that hasn't had a significant party backing it in modern times (although it was once SNP policy) and leaves that block hunting around for whichever is the more immediate option.
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...get a say.
(Hague was also weakened by contemporary polls of sections of the party - peers, MEPs, National Union officials and constituency chairmen - though IIRC actual members were not polled - that all firmly chose Clarke. That made it hard to resist the case.)
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...uphold the supposed divine wisdom of MPs when vast swathes of the party were disgusted with the way the parliamentary party had behaved in the Major years. The media and other parties pilloried the Conservatives over this and just about every leadership candidate conceded that members would...
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...public and make the case against - most articulate MPs were on leadership campaigns. Sir Archibald Hamilton, the 1922 Chairman (and apparently my then-local MP but I never saw him in the local office and only once met him on the streets) was atrocious at countering the arguments, trying to...
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Started listening. One point that is now forgotten - the shift in the Conservatives wasn't a Hague idea but was actually a grassroots campaign that got a voice in 1997. Activists, especially those suddenly without a local Conservative MP, were calling for a say. Very few were willing to go in...
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It will be very difficult to amend the party constitution to do that.
And many members feel the real problem are the MPs a) only selecting two names and b) engaging in silly tactics that result in the members getting a poor choice. It wasn't the members who rejected Penny Mordaunt or James Cleverly
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That's a handle?!?!?!
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This strikes me as one of the problems the EEC/EU was always going to have with the UK. For most countries membership was seen as a result of success, of having made it and overcome 20th century history.
For the UK it was seen as a result of failure and it's hard to be deeply enthusiastic about that
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My not-too-well-researched instinct is that the big shift occurred around about 1990 when variouslt the Delors TUC speech, the Bruge Speech, Factortame, the fall of Thatcher, end of the Cold War, the ERM and Maastricht all occurred and modern Euroscepticism was born. Did your research bear this out?
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Wasn't Vanguard proposing a Yes vote?
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Farage doesn't even live in Kent. No idea about Yusuf.
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Regardless of everything else, that letter should be brutally rejected for the needless use of the serial comma. I always feel one of the greatest achievements of the Truss Government (okay not a high bar) was the Deputy Prime Minister's style guide deprecating it.
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Has anyone ever actually counted up how many parties there are in the Ukip splinter gene pool?
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Nuttall doesn't seem to have fallen out with Farage yet. He's the RefUK party director for the North West.
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We were clearly denied something when Wayne Kerr failed to rise further in Ukip.
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Hyphens have a habit of wandering in and out of names, especially when there's a Scottish connection. I've had the same problem for years.
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I used to rattle off the number but stopped when I was told off after we'd had a obscene phone call and was told apparently giving the area code not the location name made it more likely they'd call back (this was pre 1471). After that I stopped bothering.
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Why does nobody in the US ever assert their 3rd amendment rights?
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What's the difference, he asks from East London Zone 3.
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Bring back Dustin the Turkey!
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Did any of the churches ever "defrock" priests literally?