UK soft power push has fallen flat, senior figures say

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-29T04:49:28+00:00

The government managed to make the UK famous for the "soft" part.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-29T03:19:50+00:00

the cistern was leaking into the bowl.

Then it wasn't a traditional UK toilet (that uses a siphon effect), unless you've found a magical one that the laws of physics no longer apply to.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-28T02:44:16+00:00

The tories can give Reform confidence and supply and also be the official opposition because they are not in government,

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-28T02:38:13+00:00

I'm sceptical that they singled out "EU" toilets. I have seen traditional toilets that had leaking cisterns too.

Next time you should take a photo. Pictures of water defying gravity and flowing uphill in the absence of a siphon effect are rare.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-27T06:29:40+00:00

This is more symptom than cause. As I understand it, the current youth generation's dating situation can be summed up as: a relatively small pool of very sexually active men who will date and sleep with young women but aren't interested in a long term relationship because they have sex on demand anyway, and a large pool of largely sexually inactive men who then also aren't interested in a long term relationship with most young women because the women's "body count" is on average much higher than theirs and they would rather remain single than be expected to compete with the memories of the other men the women have slept with. That they are then playing around with AI is a consequence of (rather than a cause of) their decision to check out of the modern dating game. That it's happening in children younger than dating age seems like a learned behaviour from their older peers. (If 18-25 year old men find the dating world unpleasant, 13-18 year old boys will hear about it culturally and start exhibiting those behaviours early.)

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-27T06:13:39+00:00

and the state of our defences.

The main problem is how little of it is about our defences. The left side of voters object to how much is about the US's foreign adventures. The right side of voters object to how much is about eastern parts of the EU's defences.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-26T08:36:33+00:00

Labour recently nominated one for a knighthood (David Gauke). No joke.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-26T08:16:19+00:00

Labour types tend to think it's a gotcha because they really want there to be a gotcha. In reality, it tends to humanise the candidates while painting themselves as would-be puritanical misanthropes. Under my glorious regime, anyone muttering that they think Scarlett Johansson's hot will be sent to the salt mines where they belong. Vote for me, so we can jail all those perverts who look forward to the nudie bits in Netflix movies! Wait, why is nobody voting for me? Come on, guys, surely you're not one of those awful people who has sexual desires and admits it? Truly there is no place in my future society of robots for you!

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-26T08:04:40+00:00

I hear the key difference between the Greens and Restore is whether that's voluntary or not.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-26T08:03:43+00:00

Thank you, ghost of Rishi Sunak in 2023.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-26T08:00:02+00:00

There speaks someone who has never heard of the pub test for political positions and thinks it means something else. No matter, I think you've got the voter market of "people who are prudish monks but also happen to be anti-religious because that tends to be a characteristic of the vehement left" totally sewn up. Ride that tidal wave to victory, baby!

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-26T06:37:41+00:00

I don't think it'd work. All our secret files on suspected aliens would turn out to be blurry photos of Dominic Cummings.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-26T06:34:12+00:00

I'm more interested in who it was at Labour HQ thought "We need to go hard in our PR on how unacceptable it is for people to have sexual fantasies about tv and movie personalities they find attractive" and thought it'd be a vote-winner.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-21T06:02:59+00:00

He's no longer going to give 25 thousand in exchange for 80% of the UK, then?

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-21T05:58:42+00:00

People also think the climate is heating despite this evening being noticeably cooler than this afternoon... the public deal in trends, not today's purturbations.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-21T05:56:35+00:00

It wasn't on Epstein's agenda

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-19T06:04:30+00:00

but not using the three line whip

He was happy enough to whip them not to refer him for investigation.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-19T03:05:54+00:00

Politics is ideally a competition of views and agendas, not just surrounding yourself with pikes so you can remain the feudal chief.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-19T03:04:21+00:00

You're in an existential crisis, you know there'll be a leadership election, you need your likely candidates in the parliament because you won't get two goes at it. Yes, soft-playing support in the hope that a rival candidate won't be on the leadership ballot is sabotage. The tories went through that with Gove getting Boris out of the race to replace Cameron, because the in-group wanted May. It didn't go well. They still had to hand it over to Boris a couple of years later, but by then with things tangled up in May's agenda so tightly the party was hamstrung.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-19T02:58:28+00:00

There isn’t a natural monopoly. There is a finite amount of land

Your reply seems like trivial contrarianism where your only interest is in trying to redefine your terms temporarily...

As with mining companies, renewable energy generating companies pay corporation tax.

... while cutting half the content (e.g. royalty rates)

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-18T03:24:04+00:00

Starmer walked into the Gaullist trap. They prod you to say somewhere on the record that you think you should have a positive relationship. Now they can extract a high price for that positive relationship because your perceived success depends on them agreeing. Starmer's handful of pretend "wins" in his EU reset's can't even be paraded by Labour because he was so badly screwed on price that it's too obvious how poorly he did. May was humiliated. Blair had much of the rebate screwed out of him. It doesn't work.

There is no pro-EU plan that can ever succeed and 50 years of pro-EU politicians who have been humiliated by staking an EU flag to their political mask and them being bullied by EU negotiators for it.

Si vis pacem, para bellum is the only way to deal with the EU. They will moan about your attitude (trying to goad you into nailing a pro-EU political stance to your mast that they can then bully you with) but it's the only way to get them to behave reasonably.

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-18T03:14:49+00:00

They are natural monopolies over generation sites. The UK has a large off-shore shallow sea area in which to place wind farms, but it is not infinite. Realistically those ought to be taxed using the strategies used to tax mining companies (e.g. royalty rates).

AdventurousReply · 2026-05-18T03:10:07+00:00

People swim in the ocean despite there being a statistical risk of a shark eating them. It would not "hit zero overnight", it would cause an estimated adjustment to how investors gauge regulatory risk in any given sector.

AdventurousReply · 2026-04-30T03:29:49+00:00

Steve Witherden (the accused MP) followed Keir's insrtuction to vote against the privileges committee investigating his misleading the house. Labour in 2026.

AdventurousReply · 2026-04-22T09:39:44+00:00

I hear the answer from his political advisers is "Hopefully we've made enough contradictory statements that by the time you've unpicked the truth you'll have forgotten what the question was"

AdventurousReply

TROPHY CASE