Gaston de Foix

Is there an epidemic of banks discriminating against innocent brexiteers I missed? Those vile, white-gloved Eurocrats handling (proverbiably) the KIng's money while planning world domination and rejoicing over the latest EU money laundering-directive.

You guys are arguing over two different meanings of "private banking". (1) "private" banking referenced in the quote above means "concierge" banking. Coutts offers services like a dedicated account manager who will give you a call/appointment within 30 minutes. A showy, pointless reason to get lower interest rates, but England is full of status-obsessed arseholes so.... (2) Coutts is not a "public bank" - it is a partly publicly owned bank through its ultimate owner Natwest. Not sure what a public bank would be in the British context but the EBRD and the World Bank are public banks in the sense that they act for the public interest. (3) Not sure what anti-discrimination laws apply to banks. Not the HRA no matter how much public ownership there is. It's not a governmental entity. Nigel Farage bringing a HRA claim would be the ultimate in irony, but would almost certainly fail. There's about a million pages of banking regulations so maybe something specific about discrimination would apply, but doubt it would apply to discriminating against political views. (4) At the end of the day, Coutts is a bank that's all about image and prestige. There's really no reason to bank there except to say you have an account at Coutts (shorthand for saying you have a million pounds or whatever their current threshold is). For them to get rid of Nigel Farage is totally in keeping with their brand, just as refusing Mohammed Al Fayed would have been 20-30 years ago. Was it disgraceful behavior? Yes. Are you stupid for wanting to bank somewhere that doesn't want you? Yes. At the end of the day, Farage is a showman and troublemaker and they should never have accepted him in the first place. That, probably for reasons of ideological sympathy, was their original sin.

British voters were not exactly inspired by Boris, but they were entertained by him and they admired his optimism and carefully projected can-do spirit in the run-up to the 2019 bloodbath. Then again, he also benefited from a very significant sense that Westminster dysfunction and internecine politics were stifling Brexit at birth. When you actually look at the electoral choices made by British voters in the last two decades, they generally chose the most charismatic option. Starmer's decision to systematically mitigate any instance of political risk in light of the broad Tory unpopularity carries a certain logic. But a hundred risk-averse decisions does not add up to an overall risk free approach or even the least risky approach on the birds-eye view adopted by voters.

Yeah, I agree with that. So the choice was between losing a vote on expulsion or having no vote (and forcing NY Republicans to defend that) and letting them point to the censure in their campaigns. Censure is any easy out for them. It makes Santos less likely to hold his seat but he's doomed anyway. It's the rest of the NY cabal we need to kick out.

explusion, not censure is the right remedy for Santos. By censuring him, the Dems are giving NY Republicans an easy out.

Is DMC OK? Not visiting forum is probably a sign of wisdom and growth etc., but I have wondered where he is especially since it's possibly summer vacay from work for him....

I wondered on this forum a month or two ago why Jack Smith's team hadn't contacted Doug Ducey. Now, they have: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/18/politics/ducey-trump-probe/index.html When the histories of the DOJ are written after the successful prosecutions and opposing appeals all the way up to SCOTUS (as I devoutly hope), we have to resist the temptation to equate Jack Smith and his team with super-heroes. The indictment is going to make damn interesting reading. Let's see if they actually found anything new beyond the Jan.6 committee report. If Meadows and Rudy have flipped (as I expect) then we will have crucial witnesses who will have sung for their supper. But Cassidy Hutchinson knew much of what Meadows knew. They will be most valuable for testimony stating directly that Trump admitted he lost the election but was determined to overturn the outcome anyway.

Why indict the cow when he's giving you the milk for free?

Because WV is a R+48 state and Manchin isn't actually going to be a spoiler. No Labels is his way of gratifying his ego about his exceptional importance to the nation before he uses it as an excuse not to run an obviously doomed campaign for reelection to the Senate in WV against Jim Justice.

Is there anything that Starmer could do, once in office, that would persuade you that his premiership was worth all the compromises? Higher taxes for the rich?

The British people had the chance to make Jeremy Corbyn PM, twice. They declined, twice. If the Labour party was foolish enough to offer Corbyn a third time, they would have declined again. Some of that was Corbyn as a person rather than his politics, but a lot of it was his politics. Some triangulation is inevitable in politics. It is both necessary and wise. That doesn't mean you should end up like Tony Blair sucking the biggest dicks in the room. Starmer's soulless, rather mechanical, calculations fall short of Blair's incredible-in-retrospect contortions. Wherever you look in British politics you see the price we paid for his shortcomings. Despite enacting the Human Rights Act, he spent much of 2004-2007 attacking his own government's achievements. The Tories followed suit and we have ended up with the Migrant Bill and the Rwanda policy. His failure to enact meaningful press regulation has haunted British politics. To fix the Lords. Cash-for-honours. And that's before we even talk about Iraq. Starmer seems much more motivated by these institutional-side reforms and they are important. But he needs to sell the British people on his ideas to do more for the poor and vulnerable and ordinary Britons. And he actually has to show that he cares. You turn people off as soon you start talking about your five or seven priorities. Who, exactly, loves memorizing lists?

Pence opposing Trump's indictment for Jan 6. would spawn a million poli-sci papers about Stockholm syndrome. I'm hesitant to give the benefit of doubt to the undeserving, but perhaps political calculation will force their hand. To have any prospect of taking down Trump a notch you need to do the hits on Fox News, and keep 'em coming.

Happy Birthday! Smith apparently sent the target letter late on Sunday night, which is the best time to fuck with someone, IMHO. Trump being Trump accidentally gave the game away on "Truth" social by mentioning the Insurrection Act, and now has made it public presumably to fuck with security arrangements for grand jury attendance. Hopefully the Georgia indictment and this indictment will both be issued in the next month. The real question is whether the rest of the Republican field will have the cojones to ask Trump to drop out. We can forget about any coordinated effort with grifting opportunists like Ramaswamy running. But if de Santis, Pence and Christie all call for Trump to drop out to focus on his legal problems that will drive media coverage for all of July/August. The political opportunity is there to hit Trump hard on his obvious inability to serve as president while facing four separate criminal trials and many more investigations. This may be the last chance for his cowardly lion opponents. We'll see.

I doubt it, but my point is that electability is not the sole or most important criterion. I don't doubt Starmer's burning passion for making Starmer PM, but what's in it for the rest of us?

There's no appetite for a socialist government but there is one for a government that cares marginally about the people. Amazing statistic: 1 out of 10 flights leaving the UK is a private jet: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/uk-is-worst-private-jet-polluter-in-europe-study-finds How about a government that actually cracks down on rich entitled polluters and reverses the disasters of austerity?: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/21/children-raised-under-uk-austerity-shorter-than-european-peers-study#:~:text=Children raised under UK austerity shorter than European peers%2C study finds,-Average height of&text=British children who grew up,for average height aged five.

Right. Your original critique of Starmer is logical and accurate. If he had run on his current platform he wouldn't have won the Labour leadership. Honestly, most people (including me) weren't paying attention to the scale of his broken promises. If you hadn't been bringing it up on this forum (and I think it came up on one PMQs), it would have escaped my notice. But is it the most effective critique? No. Same with his management of the Labour Party quoted above. I will say he is (rightly) getting plenty of push-back on this policy from outside the cabinet. But Tony Blair was hardly any kind of democrat, and Starmer has a much harder path to tread. But if the Labour party doesn't stand for the poor and the vulnerable, then what is its point? Being marginally better than the Tories will not motivate anyone. It sure as shit wasn't how Tony Blair won in 1997. And actually the disasters of the later Labour governments from 2003-2010 can be chalked to Blair's commitment to promising all things to everyone.

That's unfortunate because while the piece is dismissive of the proposition that Starmer is to be discounted because he broke his promises, it does ask the more important question: what's a labour govt. for if its ruthlessness in pursuing power leads it to abandon labour's most fundamental commitments (and what are they anyway in Starmer's mind)? A question people are asking more and more about Starmer. Your view that broken promises is a betrayal of those fundamental commitments is not universally shared; the unease with the Starmer project is much broader (but shallower) than that.

@Spockydog: I read this and wondered what you would make of it. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n15/james-butler/short-cuts

And Cormac McCarthy too. From the perspective of Subcontinental/Indian literature, the literature Nobel doesn't track either popular or vernacular sentiment. It's irrelevant. It's awarded too rarely, and too randomly, to have much meaning at all. Rabindranath Tagore and VS Naipaul are supposed to reflect 100 years of literature. Give me a fucking break.

There's a variant of this joke where the passcode is the number of his children. On a more serious note, I do think you see in both him and Elon a common version of the megalomania delusion of wanting to seed the world with your genetic stock but indifference to actual parenting. There is no way he could have been an active father to 9 (or more!) children while pursuing his political career.

That joke was sitting there waiting to be made. What would be the point of doing this? There will be an official recording and a transcript prepared anyway.

A lot of people are making sensible points about how his behavior was inappropriate and it probably was. But what it really strikes me about the fair-minded post above is the number of statements that have to be predicated by 'if...'. There has been no neutral, balanced, fair-minded investigation of facts that has allowed Edwards a fair opportunity to tell his side of the story. And while the BBC undertakes that investigation a combination of circumstances (including his wife's words) has revealed: (i) his identity; (ii) the most salacious allegations. It seems like everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown at him. If he broke COVID lockdown rules then that was wrong, but also, let us acknowledge, unremarkable. At this point everyone knows he's never going to walk into the BBC building again. His journalistic career is over. And if there was even a 1% chance that he was being wronged here then what we've lost is that fairness and due process. Even if the investigation largely concludes what happened here is prominent, lonely man struggles with his sexual identity and makes a fool of himself chasing after young 'uns. And yes, the 99% chance is that more and more damning words can be added. But 99% is not 100%. Maybe I'm a bit biased because I saw him on WILTY and liked him. Dunno. But I remember when Liz Truss became PM and the media raised for no reason at all a decade-old story about her affair with Mark Field. I felt desperately sorry for her husband and young kids.

@Heartofice, could you please share the source of your facts please? Seeing a lot of chatter about the presenter, but not the basic facts from a responsible news source. Hell, I'll even take the Sun's version of events.

Númenor before the fall or Galadriel and Celeborn? YOU DECIDE. I saw a rumor that Meghan is going to appear in a movie. Does anyone know if its true? Whatever you think of her skills as a podcast host or children's author, she was smoldering in Suits. She also did a voice-over for Disney. It used to be the case that actors ceased their profession after becoming royalty (a la Grace Kelly), but that may be an outdated rule...

I think the two of you are largely arguing past each other. It is fair to say that you should judge any political entity for its record since it was independent and/or newly constituted. Modern-day Indians are hardly responsible for what the British Raj did. Pre-Independence Canada was a colony and though it gained greater independence over time it did not have an independent foreign policy until the 20th century. That said, the claim that Canada did not engage in colonialism in the 20th century is a claim that proves little except that it was a large, sparely populated country whose dominion status within the British Empire meant that it had all the benefits of imperialism such as access to resources and trade. Canadians did fight and die in Britain's wars including imperial ones such as the Boer wars.