George Carty

Reform's one advantage over the pre-2024 Tories is that they may be better at getting the votes of the kind of working-class bigots the BNP used to court.

Do you think car-brained people are (for some reason) over-represented on local Facebook groups?

Isn't it ultimately mostly down to selfish, bigoted voters who don't just oppose immigration, but also oppose new housing construction along with any government spending (such as on childcare, education or working-age benefits) that they don't personally benefit from?

And where do you live yourself, if you don't mind telling me?

I never imagined there was much migration _to_ former pit villages in County Durham: who are these people?

(And how significant is it that we only started seeing black faces in places like this in the past decade or so?)

Wouldn't Durham City (as a UNESCO World Heritage site) be ultra-NIMBY? Whenever the production of a good is restricted, producers will concentrate on the more profitable top end of the market: it's why Japan's Big 3 car makers each introduced new luxury marques after the Plaza Accords in the 1980s.

Or often Temu these days.

I think it's called "showrooming"!

And a big part of the problem is that said real estate companies are often highly leveraged, and therefore can't cut rents to the market-clearing value because their creditors would foreclose.

Not so much "capitalism" as "financialism", as the landlord is almost certainly heavily in debt themselves (which is why they can't cut their rents: their creditors would foreclose).

‘You’d be ashamed to bring someone here’: The struggling billionaire-owned high street that shows Reform’s road to No 10 Newton Aycliffe was meant to be a model town for a fairer postwar Britain. But unaffordable rents on a high street amounting to 0.12% of its property tycoon owner’s holdings have made it a symbol of d...

Fascinating and disturbing piece about a high street strangled by property barons.
The decline of the high street makes provides fertile ground for Reform but would Reform really sort out property barons? It’s more likely that they are funded by them.

www.theguardian.com/society/ng-i...

Dear Israel: this year, instead of sending a representative to the Victory Day parade in Moscow, send weapons to Ukraine.

I suspect a lot of the rise of misanthropic far-right politics is down to the zero-sum competition between drivers for road space and parking space.

I'm thinking that the more fanatically Nazi part of the German population may have been disproportionately likely to join the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht, or to choose especially dangerous assignments _within_ the military.

Perhaps it's down to the after-effects of empire on the British economy, that persisted for some time after formal decolonization?

Perhaps Euroscepticism (unusally strong in UK Boomers) was their gateway drug to Radical Right politics?

The word "toady" is derived from "toad-eater," which in the 17th century was a job.

The toad-eater's job was to eat an entire toad, which people thought were poisonous, geek-style and then pretend to be dramatically dying until "cured" by the guy selling the snake oil.

The fundamental problem is the demographic Impossible Trinity: high life expectancy, stable or falling population, high workers-to-retirees ratio, pick two!

His "weakness" was because the rank-and-file Tory membership (who had had the final say on new Tory leaders since 1998) was rabidly Europhobic.

At least the Hutus _had_ been historically oppressed by the Tutsis...

I wonder if the left (particularly in the UK and Germany) also opposed nuclear because they saw it as a threat to the livelihoods of coal miners?

Surely the real problem is that newspapers don't actually _make money_ any more, now that the internet has robbed them of their advertising revenue?

Why did the word "milliard" never catch on in Britain, unlike continental Europe?

Most media outlets lose money, and thus become the playthings of oligarchs willing to subsidize them for propaganda purposes.

Perhaps he's descended from Spaniards, with none of the Native American blood that most US Latinos have?

MAGA sees non-whites as vermin and white opponents as race traitors.

When I said that the rest of County Durham isn't paying its way, I meant that it's heavily dependent on state pensions and benefits paid by _central_ government: I wasn't thinking of the situation with _local_ taxation specifically.

Could you point me to more info about Durham County Council financial mismanagement 2021-5?

I'm guessing that's a phonetic spelling of "Kelloe"?

(My grandfather worked at their pit once...)

Perhaps Durham City gets the nice stuff because it's the only place in the county that actually pays its way (largely thanks to the university)?