🇮🇪 Nice to see Ireland on the Olympics medal table. An incredible bronze medal for Mona McSharry in the 100m breaststroke.
🇮🇪 Nice to see Ireland on the Olympics medal table. An incredible bronze medal for Mona McSharry in the 100m breaststroke.
🥇 New post: An Olympic effort
To me, it was such a refreshing change to have the ceremony away from the enclosure of a stadium. Why wouldn’t you use the beauty of Paris - one of the most stunning cities in the world - as your backdrop, when you know the world is watching?
📺 Aaaand…. that’s enough news about elections for today. I’m out.
🚨 Finally, they’re going to investigate the fraud committed during the pandemic.
From The Guardian:
Chancellor understood to believe £2.6bn of public money lost to fraudsters during pandemic could be recouped
Disappointed to see no mention of “banning speakerphone in public” in this morning’s King’s Speech to parliament.
Time to start a petition, I think…
📸 The morning after…
My Apple Watch tells me I got four hours sleep last night. And that wasn’t event a solid four hours, but split across the whole night. And it shows!
No regrets, though - I got to see history in the making. And now? More coffee…
So my plan to stay up night to watch the election failed miserably 🤣
My last memory is of about 2am and I woke up again at 5:30am. That said, I’m waking up to some amazing news.
Not just a Labour victory - an overwhelming one - but some delicious results and the exit of some of the nastier and more feckless Tories. I also notice George Galloway and his divisive vitriol was rejected by voters.
It’s not all good news, however. Some truly dreadful people have kept their seats and Farage’s bunch of bigots have made gains. And where they weren’t actually elected, they came a very close second. How much of this was simply protest votes, rather than a systematic swing to populism - only time will tell.
I’m going to enjoy watching Labour settle into power, appoint their talent, and start to make a difference. Followed very quickly by an inevitable Tory civil war and they try to decide just how right wing they can be without actually actually wearing uniforms.
🗳️ I’ve brought my duvet and pillows out onto the sofa so I can keep watching the election results. I’m going to attempt to power through for a couple more hours. I have drinks and snacks galore and I’m enjoying a delicious Majorcan beer to celebrate the exit poll.
So, I’ve finished work for the week and I’m not sure what to do with myself between now and 10pm, when the exit polls are published.
Too wound up to have a nap (yes really!) and I’m all caught up on my favourite podcasts. Maybe some comics for a bit of escapism…?
Honestly. I’m quite literally counting the hours until I can vote in the general election and then sit back and watch the results come in.
It’s been a long 14 years of chaos and mismanagement under a series of weak and ineffectual Tory governments - despite their sometimes massive Commons majorities - and in the closing days of the campaign, with their dying breath, they criticise Kier Starmer for wanting to carve out some time on Friday evenings to be with his family.
Let’s set aside Boris Johnson literally parting while we were all under lockdown. Or his defence secretary going on holiday while the evacuation of Kabul was descending into farce. Starmer is saying he wants to ensure his family don’t suffer because of his job and, where possible, he’ll have dinner with them each Friday evening.
He will be living above his office, in 10 Downing Street. So the Tory howls of “What if there’s a crisis after 6pm on a Friday?” ignore the fact that the PM is probably the best connected person in the country. Instantly contactable, always kept in the loop.
But it also points at a certain disdain for anyone not glorifying the broken long working hours culture that pervades Conservative circles. Long hours somehow equates to being a professional. Whereas working your allotted hours, working part-time, or working with flexible arrangements in plane: quelle horreur!
I’m planning to stay up overnight on Thursday night, Friday morning. I want to see the looks on their faces as they realise they’ve lost badly and to see the chief apologists for the nasty culture war lose their seats live on TV.
And yes, I’ll have the champagne on ice on the off chance Rishi Sunak loses his own seat.
🗳️ After a quick scan of the news headlines, I can only conclude: Thursday can’t come soon enough.
We need to bin these desperate, lying, ineffectual grifters. Vote!
🗳️ I missed last night’s political debate between Sunak and Starmer, opting instead to enjoy dinner with friends.
Rather than getting frustrated with an evasive, prickly and out of touch Tory laughing stock spreading outright lies about the Labour party’s plans for government, I enjoyed a delicious tasting menu at ‘Six by Nico’ and tales from my friends' recent cruise on the Queen Mary 2 back from New York.
I think I made the right choice.
Four very different performances. John Swinney from the SNP was calm but fighting a losing battle with a largely English audience. Ed Davey was human, polite and seemed very genuine. Keir Starmer was competent, a bit awkward (isn’t he always?) but better than at previous similar events.
But Rishi Sunak stood out for me. He was simply dreadful. And bear in mind this is the Prime Minister, with an army of PR experts, spin doctors, media gurus and the like at his disposal. And he still managed to come across as an unlikeable, impatient and condescending tech bro who feels you just don’t ‘get’ his product.
He seems like a guy who’s never had to explain himself to anyone before. Someone who simply gets what he wants. Someone who surrounds himself with people who think like him (or know enough to act like they think like him) and has virtually no empathy for people who don’t share his background or world view.
He struggled to explain his ‘plan’ for national service, couldn’t explain how he’d make like better for young people and got particularly evasive when asked about his regrets. He was genuinely rattled by a couple of audience questions, looked puzzled and then angry and simply oozed impatience to get the hell out of there.
Like everyone else in the country (world?), he knows the writing’s on the wall. He’ll be out of a job in less than two weeks and nothing he can do will halt an inevitable landslide win for Labour and the gutting of his own party. After fourteen years of mismanagement, sleaze and ineptitude, it’s not a moment too soon.
The sad thing? I don’t think it’ll change Sunak one bit. Rather than wonder why he’s getting thrown out, he simply thinks the public are too thick to understand his ‘plan’.
🗳️ It’s like a game of fascist bingo…
Nigel Farage has praised the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate for being an “important voice” for the “emasculated” and giving boys “perhaps a bit of confidence at school” in online interviews that appear to be aimed at young men over the past year.
Of course.
When asked to list the best leaders in the western world, Farage named Hungary’s rightwing leader, Viktor Orbán, a “strong leader”, and his “friend” Donald Trump, the US presidential candidate.
The Guardian: Farage said Andrew Tate was ‘important voice’ for men in podcast interview
☀️ Successfully avoided another game of international kickball. Popped in my Airpods and lay out in the sunshine on my balcony. The streets below were deserted as everyone went in to watch “Ingerlaaaand”…. draw with Denmark.
Ahem.
And politicians wonder why the public has lost trust in them?
Another Tory candidate has allegedly placed a bet on the date of the election. And her husband is the Tory head of campaigns. Who has just gone on a ‘leave of absence’…
Tories gonna Tory.
From The Guardian:
The Conservative party has confirmed its director of campaigning Tony Lee took a leave of absence on Wednesday. His wife, Laura Saunders, is being looked into by the gambling watchdog over an alleged bet on the general election date.
We’re two weeks out from a general election, but at 6pm, instead of the news, the BBC is showing (wait for it) football. Turkey vs Georgia, to be precise. This country’s obsession with football is something else.
🇹🇭 Congrats to Thailand for recognising marriage equality 🏳️🌈
Thailand passes historic bill recognising marriage equality. Country on track to become third in Asia – after Taiwan and Nepal – to legalise same-sex marriage
I’m excited at the very real chance that the Tories will be decimated and kept out of office for the foreseeable. I’m worried that indifference and overconfidence will keep many away from the ballot box, making all this a pipe dream.
Fourteen years of mismanagement, chaos, underinvestment and culture wars have left the UK reeling from crisis to crisis. Schools literally falling apart, an NHS on its knees, isolation from Europe and a carnival of idiots taking turns occupying the most important roles in government. It’s been an absolute shambles and the Tories have most definitely put their party before the country.
Labour aren’t offering us the answers to all the problems, nor are they promising to pay for everything people want. They’re dealing with the mess they anticipate finding on day one. And while I don’t live and breathe what they claim to stand for, I’d take them in a heartbeat over the clowns running the show right now.
The Tories have had fourteen years to show us what they stand for, and they’ve done it with impressive regularity. They stand for rules for others, not them. They stand for making a profit from every possible opportunity. They stand for punching down on the most deprived, while leaving the most wealthy and advantaged free of any taxation burden whatsoever.
Pardon me my schadenfreude, but I’ve booked July 5th off work, so I can stay up all night to watch the results. While some of the biggest cowards (Gove, Leadsome et al) have already indicated they won’t stand, depriving us of the joy of watching them lose their seats, there are enough Tories left to be made unemployed that my night won’t be without some highlights of joy.
But once the excitement of election night is over, Labour will have a mountain to climb. How to address the underinvestment? How to repair relations with the EU? How can they do something about the appalling infrastructure and the state of public transport? Their to do list is incredibly long.
I don’t envy them.
Some of the Tories are already warning against a Labour ‘super-majority’ - which is in itself a nonsense, as the concept doesn’t exist in the UK system of government. But if Labour win a landslide, I hope they get more ambitious with their plans, to speed up turning the ship around and addressing the core issues like child poverty, crime and healthcare.
We’ve had enough culture war nonsense, enough ‘excitement’ and enough emphasis on personality.
I’d opt for stable and boring, morning, noon and night.
Bring on July 4th.
🗳️ These local election and by-election results are giving me life this morning.
Schadenfreude? Absolutely. I’m hoping the assorted thugs, bigots and idiots in Downing Street had a very, very sleepless night.
Next up: Sunak calls a general election and we wipe the Tories off the map.
Oh. It looks like the Tories are going to fuck up another infrastructure project. What a surprise. Sunak knows he’ll never have to depend on public transport. He’s above such things. He just hops in a helicopter…
“Ending the line at Old Oak Common is pretty much the definition of a railway to nowhere.”
HS2’s Euston station at risk as Old Oak Common emerges as potential London terminus
Just spotted that Tony Bennett has died
During a career that spanned seven decades, the crooner sold millions of records and won 20 Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award.
I was lucky enough to see him perform live at the Royal Albert Hall many years ago and was blown away by his energy and his sense of humour. He was a giant of popular music.
Spotted on my walk around Shoreditch this morning…
Of course these reactionary Tories are against anything that could improve working lives. They spread an over-simplified, fear-based message and propagate it with dark money from fascists in the US.
A rightwing lobby group that doesn’t declare its donors is spearheading a campaign to undermine the spread of the four-day week in the UK.
Rightwing lobby group campaigns to undermine UK four-day week, The Guardian.
Picturing Suella Braverman weeping into her coffee this morning:
“The court heard from UNHCR that Rwanda had a record of human rights abuses towards refugees within its borders, including refoulement – forced removal to countries where they are at risk – expulsions and arbitrary detention. The refugee agency warned that the Home Office would not be able to guarantee the safety of asylum seekers who were deported to the east African country.”