Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has said that there isn’t much money, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall has said she plans to keep the Tories welfare cap.
They aren’t doing much to counter the claims that they are a bunch of Tory entryists.
and apparently veterans ids were not valid, which seems insane.
according to the internet however “if you are living in northern ireland and have the war disablement smartpass” that’s okay.
allowing some travel cards but not others, and not allowing various government issued ids sure does sound like “picking your voters” to me ( if not exactly gerrymandering )
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
I’m also mid-fifties, don’t have a car or a passport. I applied for a Voter Authority Certificate for which I merely had to provide my NI number and a photograph. There is nothing on that paper that has any information about me pretty much beyond that; this is the sort of ID card system that I support - there’s literally no reason for it to do anything other than identify that you are who you say are.
That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with the broader point - postal votes don’t have the same sort of scrutiny and they are also automatic which is another reason why over-60s are disproportionately represented in the electorate since once you are on that list, it becomes a trivial exercise.
Hopefully, the throw-away comment made by Starmer a couple of weeks ago that he is in favour of automatic voter registration will turn out to be an actual thing. What needs to be solved, of course, is the address problem. One reason younger people are less common voters is partly because they move around due to being forced to rent. Once you are a home-owner, you are far more settled which affects your “investment” in a local community.
I actually understand this - it’s because it’s not a universal ID; only veterans can qualify to have a veterans ID. It’s the same reason why student IDs are not valid - only students can have them.
Whereas everyone over 60 qualifies for the travel card automatically, so it is not exclusionary and therefore valid. (I believe that the same argument holds for driving licenses and passports, they are considered to be universal IDs, although obtaining them is a different process.)
Note: I am not saying this because I support the system! It’s just an observation about how sometimes avoiding discrimination can be weird.
I got one of those voter id certs. It was much easier than I thought, even though no one should bloody well have to, obviously. I did the form on my phone’s browser, took a selfie and it arrived in a couple of days.
Hmmmm. Not everyone has a driving licence. In fact, some people can’t even apply for one, so I’m not sure that will wash
I think that in theory everyone can - I think you can apply for a “provisional” license without any intention of driving, but obviously that’s a really weird thing to do!
But I don’t know the exact details; it’s quite possible that this is an edge case example where reality does not actually quite coincide with what people “think” reality is, so you may well be correct.
Maybe you can, at that. I was thinking of people with disabilities that preclude you from driving, but possibly the are allowed to apply for a provisional anyhoo 
I misread that as “thought leader Nigel Farage” and snorted my coffee…
Technically, Reform isn’t a political party, it’s a limited company owned by Nigel Farage. Even to the extent it’s a party, it doesn’t have a national organisation. It’s got a lot of temporary protest voters from the right wing of the Conservatives this time, but one of Reform’s various former versions (UKIP?) got 13% back in the day and its vote share collapsed completely in the next election.
This isn’t an argument against proportional representation.
You only qualify automatically for a free travel card if you live in London. In the rest of the country you have to be over 65, but at 60 you can buy a rail card. I don’t know if a rail card is valid ID since I use my driving licence.
I was hoping my daughter could try the experiment of using her Japanese passport as valid ID to vote, but she was away in London so I had to be her proxy.
While it’s 1% more in terms of vote share, it’s literally fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour won in 2019 - Turnout has slumped just that much.
In effect, Starmer has bored his way into power, and this “landslide” is just an artefact of the right being split between the Tories and Refuse, the left being surpressed and the centrists voting efficiently for either the Lib Dem or “Labour” candidate in each seat.
Hasn’t changed that much, has he?
Someone noted that the story here should be that UKIP got 13% in 2015 but Reform still only managed 15% ten years later, which suggests that they aren’t really doing that well.
It’s also worth noting that the vote ‘collapse’ was due to Farage standing down a lot of candidates in the 2019 election because he had successfully forced Johnson into making it “the Brexit election”, and he didn’t want to risk what actually did happen this year, given that Corbyn was the opposition leader. I guess he felt that Starmer was right-wing enough that this was his best chance to destroy the Tories without risking a left-wing government with a big majority.
(Whereas the main reason I don’t think Farage would try to join the Tories is because he would then just be another Tory and he’d lose all that endless media coverage which a malignant narcissist needs to survive.)
He reminds me of something from Animal Farm.
Not Shown: Newly promoted Chesterfield (Labour) and Bromley (Conservative). Someone had to spoil the party.
Let’s hope Our Lady of Perpetual Noms will keep her Medjed fish gnawing away on the tories and nigel garbage’s pseudo-party, and all bigots everywhere.
Medjed were a kind of elephantfish worshipped at Oxyrhynchus (Gr. Ὀξύρρυγχος) in ancient Egyptian religion.
The fish was believed to have eaten the penis of the god Osiris after his brother Set had dismembered and scattered his body. A settlement in Upper Egypt, Per-Medjed, was named after them. They are now better known by their Greek name Oxyrhynchus, meaning “sharp-nosed”, a nod to the Egyptian depiction of the fish. As a sacred fish, they are frequently depicted wearing horned sun-discs. Some figurines have rings to enable their wear as pendant amulets.
Freshwater elephantfish (subfamily Mormyrinae) are medium-sized freshwater fish abundant in the Nile. Some of the species have distinctive downturned snouts, lending them their common name. The Oxyrhynchus fish depicted as bronze figurines, mural paintings, or wooden coffins in the shape of fish with downturned snouts, with horned sun-disc crowns like those of the goddess Hathor, have been described as resembling members of the genus Mormyrus.
The city, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, is also an archaeological site and is considered one of the most important ever discovered. For the past century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been continually excavated, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the time of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander, fragments from the Gospel of Thomas, and fragments from Euclid’s Elements.
Oxyrhynchus
I thought this guy was Medjed.
