And he’s gone….horrible guy!!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/28/minister-josh-simons-resigns-labour-together

Just added this as Labour clearly firing this out on a busy news day!

The House of Lords has finally accepted the legislation to abolish the remaining hereditary peers.

The Earl of Devon opposed the move, insisting that they would be missed. I suspect you would struggle to find someone who knows who the Earl of Devon is. That is, unless you made it easy. Is the Earl of Devon

a) Dave Smith

or

b ) Charles Peregrine Courtenay?

Which one of those thinks that he deserves to be part of the legislature because of something that happened around 900 years ago?

Good riddance to them.

14 hours ago, Suedehead2 said:

The House of Lords has finally accepted the legislation to abolish the remaining hereditary peers.

The Earl of Devon opposed the move, insisting that they would be missed. I suspect you would struggle to find someone who knows who the Earl of Devon is. That is, unless you made it easy. Is the Earl of Devon

a) Dave Smith

or

b ) Charles Peregrine Courtenay?

Which one of those thinks that he deserves to be part of the legislature because of something that happened around 900 years ago?

Good riddance to them.

Saw that and then looked him up/ his net worth etc. Certainly won't be missed, good riddance!

BBC News

Legal advisers help migrants pose as gay to get asylum, u...

The BBC exposes a shadow industry charging migrants thousands of pounds to help them cheat the asylum system.

Mandelson scandal rolls on. Does feel like everyone is starting to narrow down Starmer's escapes a bit following him giving a detail of the appointment yesterday only for the person he sacked now to start contradicting him.

Only not a resigning matter immediately because the specifics are hard to follow for gen. public and even people actively aware of the case like myself. At least I think so.

Abbott and Thornberry both had good moments over the past few days:

Starmer has actually been fairly OK with the Iran war, but this is never going away no matter how many scapegoats he uses, just an absolute disaster for him and it's entirely his own fault. He'd better be praying for OK local election results, which is not looking likely, I'd be quite surprised if he lasted the rest of the year. Which really will be the point when the public ask what has actually changed...

This is all just good for parties like reform let’s face it.

I personally couldn’t care less about this story.

If I was PM, I will scrap parking charges and parking will be free. Parking fines will only occur if someone is parked obstructively ie. double yellow lines, taking up multiple spaces

Edited April 23Apr 23 by Hadji

I think councils control that sort of thing do they not?

Unfort there being so many using cars they have to charge for finite space in towns and cities. So agree it should be a thing drivers pay for.

BBC News

Protests may need to be stopped in some cases, Keir Starm...

The PM tells the BBC he is concerned about the "cumulative" effect of marches on the Jewish community.

Well that's chilling to see as the top story on the BBC.

So after Labour's historic losses in the local elections, apparently the antidote to reviving Starmer's reputation of being out-of-touch with what the voters want is...to bring back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman (the latter being an strange one given Starmer's problems started due to the appointment someone p****-adjacent).

Catherine West (who?) has said she will challenge Starmer for the leadership if no minister does by Monday, which could lead to the first leadership challenge of a sitting Labour since Jeremy Corbyn was challenged in 2016 by Owen Smith (who?). I think we'll see manoeuvres with someone else before the end of next week.

West is a soft-left about in the middle of the party, with some prominence during Corbyn's tenure as a Remainer but even then I have never heard of her before now, but then you don't tend to know much about stalking horses.

Gordon Brown is good to see back but I don't know if it'll save Starmer. Starmer's going really hard sending the message that he was elected to see out a 5-year term - whether the Labour Party will agree...

Brown needs to be left in the retirement home.

Are we now Italy? Like is it official? If so, do we have a timeline for the implementation of better cuisine? Are we getting their weather too? Or just their miserable politics and economics?

Wes Streeting thinking he is material for anything other than the bottom of a bird cage is however the funniest thing to come from all of this.

I guess I should be thrilled about this as there’s no way the Union survives prime minister Farage

So it looks like Harriet Harman can’t save Starmer? Diddums

2 hours ago, Silas said:

Wes Streeting thinking he is material for anything other than the bottom of a bird cage

The way I just choked on my coffee this morning

Wes Streeting is the worst possible outcome, and yet the most likely and most revealing of where Labour is in 2026

I think Streeting would be a good choice. But not a good choice to keep a happy Party.

But the whole thing is just a massive trap at the moment imo. The public hate parties flip flopping and changing leaders and I don’t think whoever the leader is will help.

I also find it funny that Burnham is seen as the saviour! Higher vote share in metropolitan areas but losing in other key battlegrounds.

I am honestly so fed up of this, I am actively trying to avoid reading news at the minute.

Forgetting my opinion of the man overall, he was pounced on from day 1 before he even had chance to make an impact, to get going with his policies and whatever else. 14 years of reign of another party and how they were running the country and trying to overturn the problems that were left behind.

I am struggling to find where things are SO bad that every day there seems to be more calls for him to resign, why? What's the massive scandal around him i'm missing? BJ was much more controversial and never had this same consistent pile on day in and out.

And the worst part if he resigns is that other parties (one in particular) will absolutely harp on that "this is not the will of the people, let's have another general election now".

Streeting is an absolute c*nt, I'll be raging if it ended up being him.

2 hours ago, Viper* said:

I am honestly so fed up of this, I am actively trying to avoid reading news at the minute.

Forgetting my opinion of the man overall, he was pounced on from day 1 before he even had chance to make an impact, to get going with his policies and whatever else. 14 years of reign of another party and how they were running the country and trying to overturn the problems that were left behind.

I am struggling to find where things are SO bad that every day there seems to be more calls for him to resign, why? What's the massive scandal around him i'm missing? BJ was much more controversial and never had this same consistent pile on day in and out.

And the worst part if he resigns is that other parties (one in particular) will absolutely harp on that "this is not the will of the people, let's have another general election now".

It’s the self centred nature of politics, people see a weakness and they exploit it. I think Starmer is toast here.

The wider problem is I don’t believe any of the solutions fix the problems. The markets believe in Starmer and Reeves and if you do something more radical then we basically end up just like Trump saying short term pain is worth long term pain? Which sounds remarkably like Brexit.

I'm no Starmer fan but the real question who would replace him? And what could they do differently if they got the job?

The likes of Rayner and Burnham might want (and indeed run on) a more left wing agenda but where would the money come from to fund bigger state projects?

Tax rates couldn't be increased without contradicting the manifesto from 2024 for which I doubt they would be forgiven at the general election in a few years. (There was enough outcry over fiscal drag alone!)

Borrowing is troublesome with debt repayment very high (£110 billion a year according to the OBR) already

We have a tax income of some £329 billion a year and a welfare bill of £333 billion (gov.uk) - no-one is going to go for pensions given the winter fuel debacle and Labour's attempt to reform benefits earned them a party rebellion so that's not going down.

The highest tax burden since the 1940's - projected to reach 37.1% of GDP by 28/29 on current plans

We have record number of millionaires leaving the UK (16.5k in 2025 according to adam smith institute). Thanks in the main to the UK being considered as expensive to set up business and more heavily taxed than other countries. That's a sizeable lack of tax income that the government won't be getting.

Put all together it paints some very heavy restrictions on what can be done by whoever is in power.

Moreover Labour won on a ticket that they pretty much wouldn't do anything too extreme (read too-left wing) so there is even a question over mandate at that point should we get there.

Well this is the problem, while remaining within the normative framework of what governments are 'allowed' to do, there's very little any government can do right now, and as such they aren't going to fix anything that will make voters happy.

Starmer keeps talking about making the pace of change be felt quicker, but the precise reason he cannot do this is that within what Labour neoliberalism, same as the Tories, somewhat even the same as what Reform would do, allows him to do, they pretty much allow as much movement as allowed and no further. In order to keep financial-backed forces happy, they have to keep the population unhappy. Though as ever, I will add on that Labour have managed to set a lot of infrastructure related policies going in energy, rail etc and they are working to make the country better in a way the more right-wing forms of neoliberalism would scrap the first chance they get. It's all just too incremental.

I'd question that Labour won on a ticket where they wouldn't do anything too extreme, their campaign tagline was 'Change'. The population perceive that things have not changed and they want things to change. I do think it's a bit bullshit that media and them are going apoplectic this soon into the term after the Conservatives were given chance after chance, but Labour and Starmer had a chance to break the system up a bit, the only way that any 'change' would come, just of course they wouldn't do that under Starmer.

I don't think any replacement for Starmer would be worth trying, even if closer to my ideological position like Rayner. The media manufacture consent extremely hard even against anything even slightly left-of-centre, they'd be hated just as much in short order, Labour doesn't have the juice in this incarnation to do the proper left-wing reorganisation needed in society.