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Cont: General UK politics [2]

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P.J. Denyer said:
And at the time she was there the Tories were in power...


But they got Truss to Oxford so I don't think 'good' even comes close.
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That is what baffles me: I knew the school was good, as my kid sister and I know a few people who went there, but really to get someone as braindead as Truss to Oxford is the work of absolute geniuses...Or a lot of serious corruption...I mean, who did her professor of mathematics dad know at Merton College?
 
Carrot Flower King said:
That is what baffles me: I knew the school was good, as my kid sister and I know a few people who went there, but really to get someone as braindead as Truss to Oxford is the work of absolute geniuses...Or a lot of serious corruption...I mean, who did her professor of mathematics dad know at Merton College?
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I failed to get into Oxford to study physics but at least I did better at the entrance exam than my physics teacher. I was the only Oxbridge candidate from that year, and the only one from the late 90s. Other schools, even comprehensives, offered coaching for the exams if there was enough demand.
 
I don't think Truss is 'braindead'; more likely an introvert who finds the public spotlight agonising. From the hustings on Thursday in Leeds, the following views became apparent:

Rish! Sunak: About levelling up. I did really well at school because I worked very hard and my parents gave me all the support and encouragement I needed. My mother was only a pharmacist [no mention of Dad, or the £30K pa needed for each of he and his brother] and if I can do well, then so can everybody. The reason people fail is because they don't work hard enough or as hard as I did. I am all for bringing back grammar schools and extending them in the regions they already are.

Liz Truss: About levelling up. I went to a school that helped me do well. However, I made my criticisms of it because I could see that whilst I did well, the school failed the children who fell through the cracks.

IOW Sunak believes his privilege was due to his hard work and merit and the same applies to everyone. Truss could see that kids don't fail because they don't work hard enough but because the school fails the kid. She is hardly 'a liar' if that is her subjective opinion based on her own experience of the school.

The hustings showed me that Sunak has a superficial grasp of politics, whereas Truss was astute and had the perspicacity to observe that while she was 'All right, Jack', other kids were not. When I was at school I simply thought, 'Thank goodness I came top and not bottom' and most people would have put down failure as a lack of ability. If Sunak had done his homework, he would be aware that whilst the mandatory 11-plus for all and grammar schools were originally brought in as some kind of 'social leveller' they were abolished because the Crowther Report showed they gave working class pupils very little advantage. They started off on a par with their wealthier classmates but soon fell back and often left with no qualifications at all. Sure, there is an argument for grammar schools for the more able who don't want to waste time with pointless 'inclusive' topics that don't lead to qualifications, but that has nothing to do with 'levelling up'.
 
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The Don said:
I failed to get into Oxford to study physics but at least I did better at the entrance exam than my physics teacher. I was the only Oxbridge candidate from that year, and the only one from the late 90s. Other schools, even comprehensives, offered coaching for the exams if there was enough demand.
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I was put forward for the Oxbridge exam but told my teachers I couldn't think of anything worse than going to Oxford or Cambridge...
 
Truss says she's planning a "Thatcherite shake-up of the Treasury" to give No 10 more control over the economy and give her more power to challenge Treasury "group think".

Also an overhaul mortgage rules to allow rental payments to be included in assessments for mortgages and she will scrap "red tape" to allow more homes to be built and give local residents a greater say on developments.

In my experience giving locals a greater say results in fewer developments.
 
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Captain_Swoop said:
Truss says she's planning a "Thatcherite shake-up of the Treasury" to give No 10 more control over the economy and give her more power to challenge Treasury "group think".

Also an overhaul mortgage rules to allow rental payments to be included in assessments for mortgages and she will scrap "red tape" to allow more homes to be built and give local residents a greater say on developments.

In my experience giving locals a greater say results in fewer developments.
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Is there a law against including rental payments in mortgage calculations? What is the penalty?

Good to see however that she has been fully on boarded with the brexit mind set and will be shunning experts when making the big economic decisions.

Looking forward to the Treasury buying £1bn of lottery tickets and helping deposed African princes extract their money from corrupt regimes
 
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Captain_Swoop said:
Truss says she's planning a "Thatcherite shake-up of the Treasury" to give No 10 more control over the economy and give her more power to challenge Treasury "group think".

Also an overhaul mortgage rules to allow rental payments to be included in assessments for mortgages and she will scrap "red tape" to allow more homes to be built and give local residents a greater say on developments.
In my experience giving locals a greater say results in fewer developments.
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Yeah it's a good one that - she knows very well (well she may not it is Truss) if it wasn't for central government imposing housing targets on the LAs they'd be no new developments in leafy areas such as I live in. So she can say she is cutting red tape whilst winking at the tory heartlands and saying but it will be up to you. Around here even with the requirement in law it is an uphill battle for any new homes - well that aren't McMansions or £35,000,000 estates, when the locals in an area can afford the best QCs or indeed are the best QCs it becomes prohibitively expensive for the LAs and developers to get approval for new housing where it is needed.
 
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Vixen said:
I don't think Truss is 'braindead'; more likely an introvert who finds the public spotlight agonising.
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I don't buy this.

Even if one assumes that the concept of introversion has any validity, many people who start out as shy, uncommunicative bairns who find talking very difficult (see both members of this household) can learn to talk to people and to conduct day long training sessions, deliver speeches/presentations to large audiences and all the rest without sounding like a broken speak your weight machine who can barely read a script. FFS, I went from barely being able to speak to anyone, to the point of it being physically painful, during my teens to talking to folk for a living by my mid-20s.

Truss has been doing the politics since a teenager at Oxford and hasn't mastered the basics of communicating verbally to groups of people, which is not a great indicator of ability to learn. Her use of language does not seem to indicate any great brain power.

The bits I didn't quote are more of an indicator of some base cunning or a good advisor, not to mention a high level of cynicism and disregard for truth, rather than much intelligence. Exam passer, who can churn out the right answers at the right time with little clear understanding of them? Mebbe; there are plenty of those around...

Unless much of this rubbish, robotic persona is an act...But then the likes of Anna Soubry, who worked with Truss, describle her ambition as being greater than her ability.
 
Talking of opportunistic hypocrites, as I just was...Look what else Jeremy Hunt has now discovered since he's stopped being a long-serving Secretary of State for Health - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...cted-blood-scandal-compensation-b2134648.html

Gosh, there was a long-running scandal over the use of contaminated blood in the NHS and the former Secretary of State apparently knew nothing about it, as he did nothing when in office. It should be noted that little has come out in the inquiry which wasn't known within the DoH during Hunt's tenure (and others) and yet they managed not to know anything...

Hunt does, among all the other hypocrites who've been health ministers of one sort or another, take the biscuit for all the things he's found out once he isn't in the department and have access to all the information, even beating Norman Lamb, which takes some doing.
 
For the sake of fairness Burnham and Hancock look a bit opportunistic on the contaminated blood thing, but not as hypocritical as Hunt or Norman Lamb over the generrality of their time in the DoH...
 
Rishi is building a private swimming pool at one of his homes in Richmond, Yorkshire, his constituency.
The council plan to close the public swimming baths as they can't afford to heat them.
Levelling up?
 
Truss says students who get top grades should automatically be invited to apply to Oxford or Cambridge.

She also wants to expand existing academy schools that are high performing, and replace 'failing' establishments with 'free schools'. She also says she would end a ban on new grammar schools.
 
In a Channel 4 interview Sunak said to Andrew Neil "We have a problem with human rights laws in this country which makes it difficult for us to achieve our objectives".


What objectives could be against human rights ?
 
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Captain_Swoop said:
In a Channel 4 interview Sunak said to Andrew Neil "We have a problem with human rights laws in this country which makes it difficult for us to achieve our objectives".


What objectives could be against human rights ?
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Well, I'm just reading Gilbert Slater's classic about enclosures...I'm sure Sunak and some of the Britannia Unhinged crew could come up with some things which would disadvantage the lower orders to the benefit of Their Betters of a similar order to that lot.
 
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