[Tubby Isaacs]

God preserve us from middle class moralisers.

Is that what it is? I honestly couldn't tell. I don't recall the last election being particularly about moderation and harm reduction. Whatever they've got to do with going to pubs till later.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Pub would also be much a safer environment, in fact with the death of the “club”, a lot of pubs have become defacto clubs and the clubs that survive are defacto pubs with a bit of a dance area.

Thinking the area I live in, the Spoons and O Neil’s become late night club venues, there are a few small club type pub venues and one big club that has recently added a late night bar and is more famous for the gigs it does with Banquet Records now.

Yeah, the relaxation of licenses over time did that. It actually predated "Labour's 24 Hour Drinking", as I once heard Liam Fox call it. All that was supposed to lead to anarchy, but all we hear about now is young people drinking less than we did in the 90s and 00s.

[Youngian]

So who are we voting for, Phillipson or Powell?

Phillipson, Keir doesn't need to hear "the members" views' when his back is against the wall. Or rather Kinnock and Burnham's views after only a year or so in office. They haven't even won a Labour leadership contest and a GE.

[Tubby Isaacs]

If Powell wins as a "voice of the members" tribune, Labour will have got off fairly lightly. Could have got a much bigger gobshite than that.

[Abernathy]

Let us not forget that “the members” gave us Jeremy bloody Corbyn - twice.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Today's moan about the government, Polly Toynbee, on local government reform, represented as being a challenge to "democracy".

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-councils

Some BTL agree- quite how transferring powers to a unitary is anti-democratic or "centralizing", I don't know. Lots, I'm pleased to see, don't. One makes the point that the worst people they'd had to brief in their job- MPs, senior executives- had been local councillors. I think we can safely lose a lot of these.

Given that the default is that England does everything wrong, I wonder why having the same set up as Wales and Scotland do for devolved matters is considered beyond the pale.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Killer argument for Polly is that people we don't like might win the new elections.

Does anyone care much, when most are clueless about what councils do and few vote in local elections? Well they may sit up and take notice when it dawns on them that Ipswich, Norwich, Exeter, Reading and many more ancient towns and cities will be devoured by mega-county councils that feel distant, not local at all. It may dawn on Labour MPs that this is a reverse gerrymander, damaging parties of the left. Many of these lost town councils have been little islands of Liberal Democrat yellow and Labour red, amid deep blue counties, which will now outvote them. Besides, Reform will sweep through quite a lot more next May. Don’t lose these small strongholds.

The Lib Dems won Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Dorset, Oxfordshire. I don't think we need to concede the entire map to Reform quite yet.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Despite the below the line rubbish about Starmer the centralizer there, the Institute for Government reckon that devolution is actually preceding reasonably well.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org. ... devolution