Politics Thread 5

Fed up talking videogames? Why?
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Cuttooth
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Cuttooth » Sun May 12, 2019 1:07 pm

Preezy wrote:
Cuttooth wrote:

twitter.com/KateClanchy1/status/1127111820664295424


*an #Oxbridge

Why do you punch down so much?

EDIT -

twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1127516765901262848



This country is in a Bad Place.

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Lex-Man
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Lex-Man » Sun May 12, 2019 5:22 pm

According to the i the Tories are close to financial ruin and are struggling to pay for their Westminster hq.

https://inews.co.uk/news/dire-funding-s ... jxJA9bsBZ0

Funding for the Conservatives has dried up so badly that the party is struggling to pay the rent on its headquarters, i has been told.

Concern among activists and MPs deepened yesterday as Jeremy Hosking, a City financier and one of the party’s most prominent donors, defected to Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party.

The failure to secure Brexit is one of the main reasons for the crash in donations, with backers unwilling to provide more cash until the issue is resolved.



I'm pretty sure they won't collapse but I don't know how I'd feel if they did go under. The vacuum they'd leave for the Brexit party would be very worrying.

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work.
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Moggy
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Moggy » Sun May 12, 2019 5:35 pm

Lex-Man wrote:According to the i the Tories are close to financial ruin and are struggling to pay for their Westminster hq.

https://inews.co.uk/news/dire-funding-s ... jxJA9bsBZ0

Funding for the Conservatives has dried up so badly that the party is struggling to pay the rent on its headquarters, i has been told.

Concern among activists and MPs deepened yesterday as Jeremy Hosking, a City financier and one of the party’s most prominent donors, defected to Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party.

The failure to secure Brexit is one of the main reasons for the crash in donations, with backers unwilling to provide more cash until the issue is resolved.



I'm pretty sure they won't collapse but I don't know how I'd feel if they did go under. The vacuum they'd leave for the Brexit party would be very worrying.


I’d love to see the Tories disappear but you are right, the vacuum it would create would let in some horrific people.

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captain red dog
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by captain red dog » Sun May 12, 2019 5:59 pm

Moggy wrote:
Lex-Man wrote:According to the i the Tories are close to financial ruin and are struggling to pay for their Westminster hq.

https://inews.co.uk/news/dire-funding-s ... jxJA9bsBZ0

Funding for the Conservatives has dried up so badly that the party is struggling to pay the rent on its headquarters, i has been told.

Concern among activists and MPs deepened yesterday as Jeremy Hosking, a City financier and one of the party’s most prominent donors, defected to Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party.

The failure to secure Brexit is one of the main reasons for the crash in donations, with backers unwilling to provide more cash until the issue is resolved.



I'm pretty sure they won't collapse but I don't know how I'd feel if they did go under. The vacuum they'd leave for the Brexit party would be very worrying.


I’d love to see the Tories disappear but you are right, the vacuum it would create would let in some horrific people.

Fortunately I think they would be heavily fractured and with no chance of Govt. I'm all for the Tories going under.

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Moggy
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Moggy » Sun May 12, 2019 6:01 pm

captain red dog wrote:
Moggy wrote:
Lex-Man wrote:According to the i the Tories are close to financial ruin and are struggling to pay for their Westminster hq.

https://inews.co.uk/news/dire-funding-s ... jxJA9bsBZ0

Funding for the Conservatives has dried up so badly that the party is struggling to pay the rent on its headquarters, i has been told.

Concern among activists and MPs deepened yesterday as Jeremy Hosking, a City financier and one of the party’s most prominent donors, defected to Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party.

The failure to secure Brexit is one of the main reasons for the crash in donations, with backers unwilling to provide more cash until the issue is resolved.



I'm pretty sure they won't collapse but I don't know how I'd feel if they did go under. The vacuum they'd leave for the Brexit party would be very worrying.


I’d love to see the Tories disappear but you are right, the vacuum it would create would let in some horrific people.

Fortunately I think they would be heavily fractured and with no chance of Govt. I'm all for the Tories going under.


Fractured amongst who? I guess some might flip to Lib Dem/Cuk, but the majority would be heading Farage’s way.

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Skarjo
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Skarjo » Mon May 13, 2019 5:39 am

Karl_ wrote:Abolish private schooling. Eat the rich.


Agree in principle but can you wait til I retire?

thx. xx

Karl wrote:Can't believe I got baited into expressing a political stance on hentai

Skarjo's Scary Stories...
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Hexx
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Hexx » Mon May 13, 2019 10:25 am

Sweden reopening their investigation in Assange...

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KK
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by KK » Wed May 15, 2019 10:05 am

YouGov wrote:The upcoming European parliament elections will be the first outing for two brand new parties: Change UK – The Independent Group and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Both will be fighting for political survival in an increasingly crowded field. A poor performance is likely to send them to an early grave.

As things currently stand, the public don’t think either of these two new parties will still be standing in a decade’s time. The majority of Britons (56%) think Change UK “will eventually fade from politics, and probably not be a force in British politics in 10 years”.

Just one in ten (10%) think the opposite, that “they are here to stay and will likely remain an important part of British politics for the next 10 years”.

The public are even more pessimistic about the Brexit Party, with 63% thinking it will fade over the next decade, compared to just 13% who think it’s here to stay. Surprisingly, given how much worse they are performing in the voting intention polls, UKIP’s prospects are just as gloomy as their newer rivals’: 61% think it will fade and 13% think is here to stay.

Despite the turmoil wracking the two major parties, with both being subject to claims that their current leaders could cause their destruction, the vast majority of Brits still expect to see Labour and the Conservatives survive the next decade. Seven in ten (70%) think Labour will still be around in ten years, with a near identical number (71%) saying the same of the Tories.

The Green Party are seen as the third most likely to still be around come 2029. Half the nation (51%) anticipate the environmentally-minded party to still be a force in years to come, compared to only 16% who expect them to have faded away.

While the Lib Dems have had a tough time following their decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, it seems like they may now be over the worst of things. In our most recent polling nearly half the public (45%) thought they were here to stay, compared to just a quarter (25%) who thought they would eventually fade.

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Winckle
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Winckle » Wed May 15, 2019 10:17 am

Preezy wrote:
Cuttooth wrote:

twitter.com/KateClanchy1/status/1127111820664295424


*an #Oxbridge

No, she's correct. You say it out loud as "Mukahang got a hashtag Oxbridge place".

We should migrate GRcade to Flarum. :toot:
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Rocsteady
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Rocsteady » Wed May 15, 2019 6:41 pm

Since I’m a tight bastard, has anyone got a Times subscription and could copy the text of the following article into this thread? Looks an amazing read.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the- ... -zqltrw5rz

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Oblomov Boblomov
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Oblomov Boblomov » Wed May 15, 2019 7:40 pm

The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg review — ‘what a staggeringly silly book this is’

This is not serious history, just a silly bit of self-promotion by a politician with an obvious agenda, says AN Wilson

AN Wilson
May 15 2019, 5:00pm, The Times

General Gordon's Last Stand by George William Joy — the general is hailed as a patriot by Jacob Rees-Mogg

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s self-consciously “old-fashioned” manners and appeals to patriotism are familiar to all TV viewers. He would like us to believe that his monetarism and his Euroscepticism have their roots in the good old days of Victoria and the British Empire — hence this book, which claims to be a work of history, but is in fact yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician.

The Victorians consists of a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions about 19th-century characters. Prince Albert is praised as “truly virtuous”. The cricketer WG Grace and the crackpot General Gordon are seen as great patriots. Rees-Mogg’s first hero is Sir Robert Peel, because he was prepared to split the Conservative Party for patriotic reasons. In the Rees-Mogg version, Peel’s decision to abolish the corn laws and support free trade rather than tariffs on imported corn becomes a parable about the European Research Group’s patriotic decision to face down the Tory wets.

Lord Palmerston, the subject of chapter two, in spite of his “complicated and notorious private life” (over which Rees-Mogg draws a boringly chaste veil), is equally patriotic. “The interest of England is the polar star, the guiding principle of the conduct of the government,” Palmerston said in 1839. We are meant to believe this would have led him to a firm Eurosceptic position in 2019.

And so the catalogue of blimps and fogeys goes on, reaching its high-water mark with . . . none other than Albert Dicey. “Thank Heavens for Albert Dicey!” Rees-Mogg’s damp squib of an essay on this forgotten constitutional lawyer is included because Dicey moved from being a radical to being a Unionist diehard over the question of the Irish backstop, sorry, I mean, over Irish home rule. Dicey thought he could stop home rule by an appeal to the “people” by means of a referendum, says Rees-Mogg. “It is his structure of parliamentary sovereignty and his understanding of referendums that provide the constitutional authority for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.”

Quite why Dicey has such “authority” in English law is not explained. What a staggeringly silly book this is! Although it is called The Victorians, it contains no humorists and no humour — where is Dickens? It has no musicians, no engineers, no John Stuart Mill, no Thomas Carlyle, no scientists, no painters, no poets and interestingly for so devout a Catholic writer, no cardinals. There’s no Manning fighting for the rights of the dockers and no Newman writing the most plausible defence of theism in the English language. “Britain’s most famous Catholic”, on planet Mogg, was the architect Augustus Welby Pugin, who was, of course, mad because he had syphilis — a fact Rees-Mogg censors.

Rees-Mogg wonders why Pugin, who had quarrelled with almost everyone involved with building the new Palace of Westminster, was not invited to the inauguration of the House of Lords. Anti-Catholic feeling? “The renewal of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales had, after all, occasioned the last strong outburst of anti-Catholic prejudice in the country.” An interesting theory, apart from the fact that the House of Lords was inaugurated in 1847 and the new RC hierarchy of bishops was established three years later in 1850.

The book is all chaps. Of the dozen characters assembled, only one is female; the figure whom Rees-Mogg calls “Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria”. Where is George Eliot? Where is Josephine Butler, or Frances Buss, pioneer of women’s education, or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first female doctor?

The oddity of the book’s style cannot be excused entirely by the obvious fact that it was written in a hurry. “Pugin’s vision for the building [the Palace of Westminster] proved to be a lasting masterpiece of Gothic design.” (How can a vision be a masterpiece?) “Let us not imagine Sleeman,” Rees-Mogg intones, “ as anything else but a classic Victorian.” What does this mean, and who was imagining William Sleeman (the administrator who campaigned against the Thugs in India) as anything other than a Victorian, classic or otherwise? “His life was a vindication of the Empire he served.”

There is a lot of vindication of the empire in Rees-Mogg’s book. In the chapter on General Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Rees-Mogg thinks he is being very fair-minded to quote Napier saying: “Our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties, was money.” He does not add that Napier, after the conquest of Sindh and the massacre of thousands and thousands of Indians, was corrupted and claimed a reward of £70,000 — a colossal sum. Rees-Mogg tells his readers that the Koh-i-Noor diamond, looted from the Maharaja Duleep Singh by the East India Company, was “given” to Queen Victoria “in recognition of a great victory”.

At this point in the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier and that does not spell out the nauseating facts behind Rees-Mogg’s weaselly phrase: “More than half of British revenue in India in this period was accounted for by duties levied on the trade in opium.” The enforcement of the opium “trade” on China, the genocidal killings, the vandalism, the destruction, is passed over in total silence.

Rees-Mogg begins by saying that he intends his book to be a corrective to Lytton Strachey’s hilarious Eminent Victorians, a work he admits to having “leafed through”, and whose cynicism shocks him. He writes as if Strachey’s book, over 100 years old, has elicited no response until his own and as if the “civilising effect” of the British Empire, and of the Unionists in Ireland have somehow passed us by. Dicey reminded the Victorians that “Englishmen are ruled by the law”. This was “a blessed state enjoyed almost nowhere else in the world outside the Empire”. Can he be serious? Has he ever heard of a country, for example, called the United States of America?

Rees-Mogg proudly says at the outset that his book will be “anathema to the present-day politically correct elite”. But also anathema, surely, to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense.

The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg, WH Allen, 439pp, £20

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KK
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by KK » Wed May 15, 2019 8:06 pm

That’ll be £2 in The Works by Christmas.

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Moggy
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Moggy » Wed May 15, 2019 8:35 pm

KK wrote:That’ll be £2 in The Works by Christmas.


That’d still be £3 overpriced.

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Rocsteady
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Rocsteady » Wed May 15, 2019 11:24 pm

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg review — ‘what a staggeringly silly book this is’

This is not serious history, just a silly bit of self-promotion by a politician with an obvious agenda, says AN Wilson

AN Wilson
May 15 2019, 5:00pm, The Times

General Gordon's Last Stand by George William Joy — the general is hailed as a patriot by Jacob Rees-Mogg

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s self-consciously “old-fashioned” manners and appeals to patriotism are familiar to all TV viewers. He would like us to believe that his monetarism and his Euroscepticism have their roots in the good old days of Victoria and the British Empire — hence this book, which claims to be a work of history, but is in fact yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician.

The Victorians consists of a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions about 19th-century characters. Prince Albert is praised as “truly virtuous”. The cricketer WG Grace and the crackpot General Gordon are seen as great patriots. Rees-Mogg’s first hero is Sir Robert Peel, because he was prepared to split the Conservative Party for patriotic reasons. In the Rees-Mogg version, Peel’s decision to abolish the corn laws and support free trade rather than tariffs on imported corn becomes a parable about the European Research Group’s patriotic decision to face down the Tory wets.

Lord Palmerston, the subject of chapter two, in spite of his “complicated and notorious private life” (over which Rees-Mogg draws a boringly chaste veil), is equally patriotic. “The interest of England is the polar star, the guiding principle of the conduct of the government,” Palmerston said in 1839. We are meant to believe this would have led him to a firm Eurosceptic position in 2019.

And so the catalogue of blimps and fogeys goes on, reaching its high-water mark with . . . none other than Albert Dicey. “Thank Heavens for Albert Dicey!” Rees-Mogg’s damp squib of an essay on this forgotten constitutional lawyer is included because Dicey moved from being a radical to being a Unionist diehard over the question of the Irish backstop, sorry, I mean, over Irish home rule. Dicey thought he could stop home rule by an appeal to the “people” by means of a referendum, says Rees-Mogg. “It is his structure of parliamentary sovereignty and his understanding of referendums that provide the constitutional authority for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.”

Quite why Dicey has such “authority” in English law is not explained. What a staggeringly silly book this is! Although it is called The Victorians, it contains no humorists and no humour — where is Dickens? It has no musicians, no engineers, no John Stuart Mill, no Thomas Carlyle, no scientists, no painters, no poets and interestingly for so devout a Catholic writer, no cardinals. There’s no Manning fighting for the rights of the dockers and no Newman writing the most plausible defence of theism in the English language. “Britain’s most famous Catholic”, on planet Mogg, was the architect Augustus Welby Pugin, who was, of course, mad because he had syphilis — a fact Rees-Mogg censors.

Rees-Mogg wonders why Pugin, who had quarrelled with almost everyone involved with building the new Palace of Westminster, was not invited to the inauguration of the House of Lords. Anti-Catholic feeling? “The renewal of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales had, after all, occasioned the last strong outburst of anti-Catholic prejudice in the country.” An interesting theory, apart from the fact that the House of Lords was inaugurated in 1847 and the new RC hierarchy of bishops was established three years later in 1850.

The book is all chaps. Of the dozen characters assembled, only one is female; the figure whom Rees-Mogg calls “Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria”. Where is George Eliot? Where is Josephine Butler, or Frances Buss, pioneer of women’s education, or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first female doctor?

The oddity of the book’s style cannot be excused entirely by the obvious fact that it was written in a hurry. “Pugin’s vision for the building [the Palace of Westminster] proved to be a lasting masterpiece of Gothic design.” (How can a vision be a masterpiece?) “Let us not imagine Sleeman,” Rees-Mogg intones, “ as anything else but a classic Victorian.” What does this mean, and who was imagining William Sleeman (the administrator who campaigned against the Thugs in India) as anything other than a Victorian, classic or otherwise? “His life was a vindication of the Empire he served.”

There is a lot of vindication of the empire in Rees-Mogg’s book. In the chapter on General Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Rees-Mogg thinks he is being very fair-minded to quote Napier saying: “Our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties, was money.” He does not add that Napier, after the conquest of Sindh and the massacre of thousands and thousands of Indians, was corrupted and claimed a reward of £70,000 — a colossal sum. Rees-Mogg tells his readers that the Koh-i-Noor diamond, looted from the Maharaja Duleep Singh by the East India Company, was “given” to Queen Victoria “in recognition of a great victory”.

At this point in the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier and that does not spell out the nauseating facts behind Rees-Mogg’s weaselly phrase: “More than half of British revenue in India in this period was accounted for by duties levied on the trade in opium.” The enforcement of the opium “trade” on China, the genocidal killings, the vandalism, the destruction, is passed over in total silence.

Rees-Mogg begins by saying that he intends his book to be a corrective to Lytton Strachey’s hilarious Eminent Victorians, a work he admits to having “leafed through”, and whose cynicism shocks him. He writes as if Strachey’s book, over 100 years old, has elicited no response until his own and as if the “civilising effect” of the British Empire, and of the Unionists in Ireland have somehow passed us by. Dicey reminded the Victorians that “Englishmen are ruled by the law”. This was “a blessed state enjoyed almost nowhere else in the world outside the Empire”. Can he be serious? Has he ever heard of a country, for example, called the United States of America?

Rees-Mogg proudly says at the outset that his book will be “anathema to the present-day politically correct elite”. But also anathema, surely, to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense.

The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg, WH Allen, 439pp, £20

Thanks man :wub:

Thoroughly enjoyed that, a great hatchet job.

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Hexx
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Hexx » Thu May 16, 2019 11:09 am

twitter.com/NiaGriffithMP/status/1126551186302226433


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Tafdolphin
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Tafdolphin » Thu May 16, 2019 11:42 am

Hexx wrote:

twitter.com/NiaGriffithMP/status/1126551186302226433



I...hmm.

Without context, which is where I am, this doesn't sound good?

EDIT: Looking into IHAT:

In 2017, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announced that the investigations would be shut down within months after MPs called it an "unmitigated failure."[10] According to the Defence Committee report, IHAT had taken up over 3,500 allegations of abuse despite most not having any credible evidence. The report found failings in the conduct of investigations and concluded that those being investigated had suffered unacceptable stress, had their lives put on hold and careers damaged.[11]


Hmm.

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Cuttooth
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Cuttooth » Thu May 16, 2019 12:24 pm

twitter.com/davidschneider/status/1128628460820271110



"We hate racism unless it's directed at groups of people we don't really like!"

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Rex Kramer
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Rex Kramer » Thu May 16, 2019 12:56 pm

Looks like the best way to get something renationalised is not to vote Labour but just put Grayling in charge.

The supervision of all offenders on probation in England and Wales is being put back in the public sector after a series of failings with the part-privatisation of the system.

It reverses changes made in 2014 by then Justice Secretary Chris Grayling.

The National Audit Office said problems with the part-privatisation had cost taxpayers nearly £500m.

All offenders will be monitored by the National Probation Service from December 2020.

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Moggy
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Moggy » Thu May 16, 2019 1:34 pm

twitter.com/bethrigby/status/1128948945424666626



I find it unbelievable that Brown was PM longer than May has been. Brown seemed to come and go in a flash, May feels like she’s been there forever. :lol:

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Garth
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PostRe: Politics Thread 5
by Garth » Thu May 16, 2019 1:48 pm

May has twelve days to go to get past Gordon Brown’s length of tenure as PM. Told she wants to get past that before she fires the gun.

Aiming high :lol:


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