martinmcker.bsky.social
Politics, environment, climate action, development and active travel
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92 following
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You are always going to bump into the realities of the disruption/exhaustion/cost or pregnancy and parenting and the practicalities of things like car seats and 3 bedrooms houses. Very few people choose to have more than 2 so getting above 2.1 is almost impossible.
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That’s awful and so daft. All the evidence is that removing cars increases footfall and benefits businesses. @greenparty.org.uk really need to be better than this
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That’s great analysis. Adding in the news that the news that the government is borrowing £20 billion a month as it does feel like we need a radical rethink on the economy or things are going to start falling over.
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The “Farage is worse” argument is much harder to make it you are adopting his policies and rhetoric. I think a lot of Labour voters will find this hard to stomach when the Greens and Lib Dems are right there.
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To add a couple of facts:
- the people coming here are working, paying to support public services and generally not using the NHS very much.
- we are closing primary schools because of the declining number of children
- the population of the UK would have fallen last year without inward migration
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So many of these issues come back to the demographics changes, which are almost certainly permanent, and no mainstream UK politician is really talking about it.
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The second last point seems like a crucial one. Starmer has no interest, or maybe ability, to prosecute a policy argue. He says whatever he thinks the people in front of him want to hear. Blair at least was, and still is, willing to try to persuade people.
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The Night Manager is on Amazon. It holds up really well.
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That’s funny. It must be like Tolstoy and happy families. Each Observer guest restaurant review is awful in its own unique way.
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It’s getting to the point where someone needs to write a weekly review of the Observer restaurant review. The Katy Wix one is my personal low point.
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Presumably it not really a “prediction”, more a function of plugging polling plus error margins into a model of first past the post constituencies.
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I love the podcast in general but I thought this one was particularly good.
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That really seems like the essence of it. Everything is geared towards not disturbing the prejudices of narrow sliver of the electorate
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This is so daft.
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Oh that’s good
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I want to watch series 2 mostly to see if he mentions the whole shower scene when he eventually finds his wife.
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I went back to Paradise and enjoyed it very much despite a few sticking plasters holding the plot together. Episode 7 was intense
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Thatcher and Blair were at least willing to take on an argument and try to persuade people. But I agree it’s unlikely to happen now.
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I think it is meant to be a comparator, to give a sense of the scale of spending.