Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies The UK's possible future prime minister thinks all websites should be classified with minimum age ratings, just like films. Andrea Leadsom is one of two candidates left in the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party; the winner of which will become the country's Prime Minister. Although many are concerned with the …
To me they both look like worthy successors to one of the greatest female leaders this country has ever had.
That said you are right this is a difficult choice, on the one hand Theresa May has the experience on the other Andrea Leadsom has clearly indicated she is in tune with the will of the people.
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And spent the rest of the time engineering an unmitigated cultural and economic disaster from which the UK has never recovered. Not to mention she lost The Falklands through sheer incompetence which lead to the loss of hundreds of lives in order to get it back.
Worst PM in UK history.
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> Maybe we could replace the "House of Lords" with a "House of Labs"
I hope some kind of Astrophysics Lab where scientist can study how its possible for the lords' heads to be so dense, but not exhibit any gravitational effects or collapse in upon itself and become a neutron star.
It does seem like a mistake to hand so much power to people whose only qualification is "My daddy was a lord that didn't pull out"
"It does seem like a mistake to hand so much power to people whose only qualification is "My daddy was a lord that didn't pull out""
It is many years since the House of Lords was purged of many of the inherited positions. The vast majority are Life Peers (683). While some were political rewards - others could be considered experts in their non-political field. Even political appointees have often chosen to become cross-benchers - so as to follow their consciences rather than their previous party's line.
There are now very few hereditary peers (89). The vacancies in their ranks are filled by voting by the House of Lords. That ensures that those with some real-world competence can be selected.
The remaining positions are the mandatory Anglican bishops (26).
http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/lords/composition-of-the-lords/
Don't knock the chap.
Ken Clarke is one of the most respected politiicians of his era.
He knew what he was doing.
As to general Conservative membership, don't do a Corbyn, do vote for least worse option, my MP is doing that, so general members do the same please.
And just remember that we do not like nutjobs like Leadsom. The UK could handle a May but not the nutjob.
Where is that black box they called the 'Internet' currently kept?, we need to locate from its secured location and give it to Andrea Leadsom for safe keeping ASAP, she needs to understand the true responsibility of safely storing this, for future generations. Just don't let Theresa near it.
Signed,
TheRegister
So every website worldwide will be required to submit themselves to an independent British organisation, likely charging extortionate fees al la the film board for each rating. Those people will be required to review all content on the website before reaching a conclusion.
How will they handle dynamic content? Will all news organisations be required to submit their articles to the board for approval before being allowed to publish? There's obviously no risk of censorship there.
What about forums, where anyone is allowed to comment, will this board be reviewing individual comments before they're allowed to be displayed?
Sounds like yet another politician trying to regulate something they have zero understanding of. Perhaps they should just encourage the parents to actually do some parenting instead of requiring the government to act as an online nanny service for their spawn.
And how long would it be before t'British t'Internet was entirely coincidentally swamped with new sites generating pages which are the equivalent of watching paint dry?
Better than watching paint dry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap.
And would the spider respect robots.txt?
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Leadballoon's idea to block unrated sites is absurd, and the issue of dynamic content is always going to be a problem. However, if all unrated sites are treated as '18', and any site that wants to be rated less had to go through a monitoring scheme then maybe something could be made of it. However, monitoring costs money, a lot of money, and I don't see the Government paying for it. Many sites, especially hobby forums that have under 18 viewers and contributors, are run on practically no money (needing donations to keep going as advertising is often not enough to cover bandwidth) so they simply aren't going to be able to afford to pay for monitoring. Also, should the ISPs police this, really, or should it be some form of age rating built into browsers? To be brutally honest, trying to classify websites is like whack-a-mole and ultimately doomed to failure, even if the reasons for doing so come from honestly good intentions.
If the BBFC needs a few million people to review British web pages then that is an instant end to unemployment! So what if we need to print £50M per day to pay for it and the exchange rate plummets to zero. Everyone will just have to stop going abroad and Buy British. As for foreign websites, just cut the cables. We are leaving the EU. We might as well leave the rest of the planet at the same time.
..." So what if we need to print £50M per day to pay for it and the exchange rate plummets to zero."
hmm, £50m per day x 7 = £350m per week.No wwhere have I heard that figure before?
By Jingo, I think I've just realised a way we could pay for it!
yet another politician trying to regulate something they have zero understanding of
How can you say such a thing. Just look at her CV. Andrea Leadsom will have learned everything there is to know about IT during the time she was a Director in charge of thousands of employees and billions of pounds.
Well, they expect overseas porn websites to comply with their age verification demands, so...
I'm sure if they offered the positions for that, they could charge the raters.
I'm thinking along lines of Woody Allen:
Michael: Did you get a job?
Victor: Yes, I got something at the strip-tease. I help the girls dress and undress.
Michael: Nice job.
Victor: Twenty francs a week.
Michael: Not very much.
Victor: It's all I could afford.
What about forums, where anyone is allowed to comment, will this board be reviewing individual comments before they're allowed to be displayed?
Well, Just in case this should come to pass, I'll need to get this in fast:
Fuck
Shit
Piss
Cunt
Cocksucker
Motherfucker
and
Tits!
...and Tits doesn't even belong on the list!
>So every website worldwide will be required to submit themselves to an independent British organisation, likely charging extortionate fees al la the film board for each rating.
Possibly, but probably not.
Leadsom is an idiot who makes Dunning and Kruger look like unrealistic optimists. She has already gained a reputation in Whitehall for being a self-regarding simpleton of the first water.
IMO there is no chance at all that this insane scheme will ever become reality. Sir Humphrey will surely distract her with detail, and before you know it she'll have moved on to forcing all women to give birth in the nearest Work House while embroidering Union Jacks onto their skivvy caps, or something.
Don't be so sure, if they succeed in pushing out Corbyn they're left with another Blairite in charge of Labour and Blair was actually more right wing than the previous conservative government. Politics in the UK is getting more and more like America with 2 parties dominating that you really can't tell the difference between unless they have a leader at one or other extreme end. The Lib Dems had an excellent chance of proving themselves to be a moderating force in politics until Nick Clegg showed everyone that actually all three parties were just slightly different shades of blue
@Fonant once you take out the militant green policies they actually have some excellent ideas, it would be interesting to see another party actually look at some of their policies and actually try and implement some of them. Would never happen though as all the main parties are only interested in maintaining the status quo.
Time for a complete change in Westminster, remove everyone and start again, have Labour MPs with truly socialist ideals, Tories that are true capitalists and Lib Dems that are truly moderate. I think this may be one of the reasons why the Tories are swinging so far to the right now, the fact that pretty much every MP now seems to be trying to claim the centre ground. The only way to show themselves to be different is to try and out-Thatcher Thatcher.
until they run out of other people's money
You can tell you're in the presence of a truly original thinker when this phrase is trotted out.
All governments use other people's money. Most of the time they run out of it too, regardless of their economic ideology. Just look at that dangerously Socialist project, the NHS, and how it's been run down every time in the last 30 years that the Tories have been in charge -- look how much strain it's under right now. And if we scrapped it completely and were handed back the proportion of our taxes that goes to pay for it, almost none of us would have enough with which to buy the equivalent level of health insurance.
Pretty big if there.
No sign of JC going anywhere soon.
the bliarites... not so much,
JC might be willing to bury the hatchet, I wonder how many CLP's will be as magnanimous at re-selection time.
not doing to badly for such a poor leader,
funny that the press hasn't picked up on this
Her and May - not much to choose from is there ?
Actually there is a lot of difference.
On the one hand we have Fuhrer wannabe May and her police state and on the other there is Leadsom that appears to think about the country and its people.
May would be a disaster greater than Cameron and Osborne combined and anything has to be better than that.
probably no one reading this now. But given what happed today I'm a bit unsure that my original opinion was correct. She has certianly helped the country today by standing down. Wether this was as she obvious was not going to win and wants to keep her options open for later I don't know/ But today she did do what was best.
BTW, I'm a left winger. While I like a lot of what Jeremy Corbyn has to offer he should now do the same, you can't do anything if no one you have to work with supports you.
Yes there is a difference. But either will be a disaster. May wants to cement the surveillance state. Leadsom has no interest in the "common man", she merely wants to legalise the (in my opinion) tax scams she has run throughout her career - see Private Eye passim.
From now on I'm using Private Eye's name for her: Andrea Loathsome.
But really it's no laughing matter, as she sounds to me like a dangerous nutjob. May, with her surveillance plans, is also dangerous, and I don't get to choose the next PM (surprise surprise, democracy in action) but if I did I'd pick May over Loathsome any day.
It's not, though, a new situation.
Chilcot has reminded us again this week that, when it comes to organising large-scale projects, politicians of all hues are either clueless as to the magnitude of the task they are undertaking and the necessary planning and preparation - or are so imbued with hubris that they simply have to issue their instruction to "make it so".
Leadsom is another Blair - she's manages to combine the comfort of her personal wealth and her prominently-worn religion into a dangerous self-righteousness. No wonder she's popular with the Tory faithful.
Choice of:
A) Swallowed Stalin without even burping
B) "Interesting CV", half of the positions occupied are in brother in-law companies, positively clueless and with a fundamentalist religious slant.
When the candidates were announced I could not believe it, but I was rooting for Josephina Vissarionovich. Sure, we all know that the next PM (and probably the one after) is a dead man walking as (s)he will be burned by the radioactive fallout of the Eu negotiations, but none the less...
@Voland's right hand - "What a choice"
And one that hardly anyone gets to make - it is only the Prime Minister after all.
There are faults with the US approach to democracy but one aspect that I like is that everyone knows who the person to take over from the President would be (the Veep) at the time of voting. So voters get to vote on the leader and their understudy.
No one in Britain voted for a government led by Theresa or Andrea (neither were Deputy PM). And yet one of them will apparently have the "mandate" to tear the UK out of the EU that a minority of the country voted for.
As much as I hate Boris, he was the person that lead the vote to leave, he should be the person to lead that exit, as it was his 'plan' that people officially voted on. (The - he shat in his bath he should wash in it principle.)
@AC - Not a majority of the population but of the general electorate. My point was that many were prevented from voting and less than half of those who actually could vote demanded change against the government advice and policy.
I know the Leave Vote won under the rules of the referendum, but it hardly delivered a clear mandate. And this party election for PM isn't giving that mandate either.
Ds,
Well, one is unreconstructed bible basher who has a problem with pr/writing resumes...
The other is an authoritan nut job...
So same old same old re qualifications for the top job?
It's not ideal my friend, but earth will continue rotating!
What's your take on it then??
Cheers,
Jay
I know a couple of people who were unable to vote for unforeseen reasons, they being respectively a severe health crisis and an unexpected work call-out to another country. Not every failure to vote was due to apathy.
The point was often made that older people were both more likely to turn out and more likely to be for Leave. I might add that pensioners also have more time on their hands to actually go to the polling station on a work day. Why doesn't Britain do like other countries and field votes on a Sunday?
-A.
"Why doesn't Britain do like other countries and field votes on a Sunday?"
Voting is considered a DUTY which is considered WORK. And in Christianity, Sunday is the Lord's Day, as in "Thou shalt remember to keep holy the Lord's Day," meaning one is not supposed to work on the Lord's Day (Sunday). Strongly-Christian countries usually don't allow voting on Sundays because it's considered a profane act. Saturday is normally out because that encompasses most of the Jewish Sabbath, and Friday is holy for Muslims, meaning the entire weekend is out on religious grounds.
It's all politics. Every announcement by a person going for a position has to be viewed through that prism.
And by what the effect is. Was May's comment the other day about the ECHR actually a statement of view, or a test to see how people reacted to the idea.
Does Leadsom really think screening websites is the right solution, or is it a play to get those who believe "something should be done" (but who would actually not go for website screening when push comes to shove) onside?
UK adult population ~61 million. Number of people who voted out ~17 million, number of people who didn't vote out ~44 million. Which number is the minority?
Using that logic, we count that ~16 million (35%) voted to remain. Or number who did not vote to remain: ~45 million.
So stop pissing about and abusing the numbers.
(Me writing as someone who voted remain)
@alain williams - "So stop pissing about and abusing the numbers."
I'll concede you have a point as I suspect my pissing around with the referendum semantics has obscured the point I was making. Please allow me to clarify:-
The referendum, rightly or wrongly, is considered as a 'mandate' by many politicians and commentators as many did vote. But no one voted for, and very few will be able to vote for, Theresa or Andrea to carry out that mandate, let alone run the whole bloody country.
I wasn't really objecting to the result of the advisory referendum being considered a mandate, I was objecting that the party election for PM is considered an acceptable way to award the job of head of government and chief exit negotiator. We should now have a general election as neither the leader we voted for nor the leader of the leave campaign voted for are doing the job of leading the country or the leave negotiations.
NB (offtopic) - Yes, I am would suggest that the number that didn't vote to change should have been considered as remain (it is government policy) but I acknowledge we can't do that after the result.
@ Don Dumb
"Which number is the minority?"
I dont disagree with your maths, I just think your suggestion is wrong. For example we are offered a boolean choice. There are 3 possible outcomes- true, false, null. Null being anyone who didnt want to have an input which leaves the tally of the true and the false.
You were technically correct until you claimed a lack of mandate. For those who cared enough to vote the answer is a clear majority with a large portion of the electorate not caring about the question. So a clear mandate has been given based on the agreed rules.
"There are 3 possible outcomes- true, false, null."
Nope: There were 4.
True, False, NULL and Non of the above.
People could spoil their ballot papers, which would count as a vote but not as a 'Yes' or 'No'. It's a very underused method of protesting the options. NULL voting (not bothering to vote) isn't included in the count so they do not affect the outcome.
...there are those who votea and those who don't, by not voting you are delegating your responsibility to those who do. By not voting you are saying 'I don't care', or 'you decide'.*
Arguing otherwise is playing into the Cameron(remember him) Trade Union voting legislation which requires a majority of all eligible voters, not just those that actually voted, this should not be how our system works, as always, be careful what you wish for.....
*obviously there may be some logistical reason that prevented someone from voting, but that is a different issue
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'"And yet one of them will apparently have the "mandate" to tear the UK out of the EU that a majority of the country voted for."'
No, the original statement was correct. They may have been a majority (albeit too small to justify so large and permanent a change) of those who voted. They were still a minority of the country.
@ Doctor Syntax
"They may have been a majority (albeit too small to justify so large and permanent a change)"
Based on the rules of the referendum it is a clear majority. But I actually agree with that statement greatly. This is the first actual vote for the EU which has been promised for over a decade. Over all that time we have been in the EU and they have shown us all they have to offer. Yet not only did they not have a large majority of support but didnt even have a majority at all. So based on that logic there is no mandate for this country to have been given to the EU nor to continue in it.
If the population can be walked over to join then the populations voice by the agreed rules is enough to justify our exit. By majority of those who cared enough to vote.
"No, the original statement was correct. They may have been a majority (albeit too small to justify so large and permanent a change) of those who voted. They were still a minority of the country."
Decisions are taken by those who show up. I didn't like the decision, but I now think it has to be carried through.
"And yet one of them will apparently have the "mandate" to tear the UK out of the EU that a majority of the country voted for."
Bloody hell! You are worse than the fucking politicians.
Or the advertisers who push some shampoo as "voted number one in the UK" followed by the weasel words " by 81 out of 120 women who expressed a preference".
This is supposed to be a tech site where we all take the piss out of people who are so mathematically challenged that they can't understand simple numbers.
I was going to rip the piss out of commentards who were insisting it was "the majority of the UK" when it wasn't even the majority of registered voters.
However I note that that is already being comprehensively taken care of.
A summary:
Just over 37% of those registered to vote chose "Leave".
Just under 34.5% of those registered to vote chose "Remain".
Approximately 28.2% of those registered to vote chose not to vote.
[Can't find figures at the moment for those who are eligible to vote but didn't register.]
So a democratic majority by our usual method of voting opted for the "Leave campaign".
However this is only 37% of the registered voters.
It is nowhere near 37% of the population.
On a more positive note, this is more than usually turn out to vote in a bunch of politicians who then run things to suit themselves. Which shows that this issue was more important than a general election.
However, for fucks sake get a grip!
Lying about or misrepresenting simple numbers is where politicians, pharmaceutical companies and Microsoft earn a living.
"Like it or not, according to the rules of the referendum, they are a majority."
Writing something down doesn't make it true....
Less than 50% of the British people voted for Brexit.
Not every British person who wanted to vote was given a chance to vote, many didn't care enough to vote or knew so little they left it to others...
"And yet one of them will apparently have the "mandate" to tear the UK out of the EU that a minority of the country voted for."
And by that logic, an even smaller minority of the country voted to stay*.
Unless it was stated at the start of the referendum (or any vote for that matter), those who do not vote have to accept the decision of those who did.
In truth, the whole thing was badly run and the person responsible has bailed out and left the mess for someone else to clean up.
* Sorry, but I believe in democracy, and regardless of my view of the outcome, this is how a democracy works.
"There are faults with the US approach to democracy but one aspect that I like is that everyone knows who the person to take over from the President would be (the Veep) at the time of voting. So voters get to vote on the leader and their understudy."
And yet you still ended up with Gerald Ford, who had been elected as neither PotUS nor VP
Sure, we all know that the next PM (and probably the one after) is a dead man walking
I'm currently torn between this kind of analysis (Bojo will be back when the waters are safe again though there might not be much of a country left by then) and putting it all down to being run by a clique of public school boys and oxbridge knobs.
Mrs Leadsom wants to bring back fox-hunting. Is she IDS' estranged sister? In any case the blue rinse brigade are going to love this.
Jolly hockey sticks!
It's like during the whole Brexit debates, and now in her speeches to become PM. She's blinkin' bonkers and lives utterly in an imaginary world. It's like her cure for the countries financial problems is that we all need to think really positively and it'll all magically happen, and if not it's someone at the back here not thinking positive enough.
May isn't ideal either but she's the least worst of the candidates we have. Although I guess neither fall into the getting blow jobs off bacon like the current one we have.
If the Conservative Party is producing Political Sausages this inept for their leadership ballot, with the raw ingredients of offal and vast quantties of rusk of such poor quality, thereby proving unfit for human consumption - surely Trading standards should get involved?
It's never been more obvious that those at the top have even less of a clue than we do, but they're happy to play political games while the country is rudderless.
If this goes completely to shit then there will be a strong case for a technocracy to try and get the country back on track (wherever that is now) which is not known to be particularly democratic.
The effect of brexist may just force the UK into exactly the re-balancing of the economy that the government discussed when they won the general election. Bear in mind when ever somebody loses money, it doesn't disappear, just ends up somewhere else.
Remember "remainers" if there are any on this web site this worked in 1992 following the effects of Black Wednesday.
"Bear in mind when ever somebody loses money, it doesn't disappear, just ends up somewhere else."
Sorry, this is drivel. If you really believe this, start thinking carefully. If money cannot be lost, then it cannot be gained either, because doing the opposite of the thing that gains money would mean you lose it. Thus our living standards are the same as in the 13th century, or any century you choose.
DS,
there is a difference between 'offshoring' and trade deals, one is sending UK/creating jobs overseas, the other is [potentially] creating jobs here, as a result of selling more of the stuff overseas due to lower/no import duties.
It's really not that complicated...
Ironically my nascent business will be better off when HMG [eventually] signs a few trade deals, as we will be exporting the bulk of our stuff from England to the far/middle east & USA...
Cheers,
Jay
What annoyed me during the investigations into the media and the Leveson inquiry is that, for some reason some areas of the media are treated as sacrosanct and others are fair game for massive censorship.
The print media is a gradually dying form (old news) but for some reason any regulation of the print media would be 'tantamount to living in Pyongyang'. Preventing regulation of newspapers would be fine, if not for the fact that the very same print media are always happy to see television, radio, the internet, films and every other form of media be heavily regulated and often pre-emptively (such as film with the BBFC). Why should Television news be subject to far more government oversight than newspaper article?
I get annoyed at the double standard applied, it's as if everyone decided the phrase 'freedom of the press' should only ever be applied literally, so everything else gets regulation, pushed hard by the print media and the print media themselves get no regulation. That seems unfair being as many sources of information have taken over from newspapers, yet newspapers still sit on this strange pedestal.
If Andrea Leadsom wants to age rate the whole of the internet why doesn't she start with press articles? - sitting there in every newsagent poisoning human decency. Oh, because *that* would be wrong, so why should heavy regulation of the internet be any more acceptable?
Paris - because pictures of her and her ilk are often at child height on the cover of papers in a newsagent, that's all perfectly fine with Andrea of course.
Because that is what Great Britain really needs to do in this economic crises : focus on controlling access to websites that might be showing a bit of skin.
Congratulations on having solved all your other problems : poverty, homelessness, illegal immigration, unemployment, failing education standards, all that is now over !
Now you can officially take care of the real problem : ensuring that no parent has to actually lift a finger in the upbringing of their offspring, it will all be handled by the Government and the rating system.
Because there is obviously no way a child can possibly use his daddy's computer to surf the web and see things that are rated above his age, no sir. Won't ever happen.
Practice Positive Thinking!
Plenty of devices have web cams these days. Just snap a photo every time someone clicks on a link. A quick £200M government IT project later and we can convert photographs to ages! Solved! I am sure the budget would only get to £4.5B, and if we scrap it when it is only a decade overdue nearly half of that money will be saved!
I was a bit disappointed last election because there was no Monster Raving Loony candidate in my constituency. Now I feel confident that the next PM will be a real monster raving loony.
Is that when a movie is released its content is then largely static. Nobody can suddenly insert a sex scene into Star Wars: The Phantom Menace dvd that my nephew owns. Web-sites change. Frequently. Do you have to submit the site for frequent re-classification?
And what do you do about user-content-driven sites? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al have all sorts of dubious content/views on them Do you rank them as 18 and over?
And do they really expect kids to self-certify? And do they really expect the majority of clueless parents to know how to block this stuff (and stop their kids from secretly unblocking it?)?
Don't get sucked into a discussion of the details.
The only real thing that the UK can do is exert control over websites with .uk domains. As soon as this becomes onerous all content will move elsewhere and even this illusion of control would be lost.
But hang on: Britain could decide to leave the internet, couldn't it? That would keep all that nasty stuff out.
In reality, this is all just an excuse to allow mass surveillance to be setup.
@Alister - Not sure why the downvotes, it's proven to be too easy to sell stupid to Dumb Britain -
Every day millions of webpages are desperately trying to get into the UK, flooding into *our* servers, clogging up *our* infrastructure, taking away browser space from decent, hardworking UK webpages. Some of them are even written in Arabic.
@Charlie Clark "But hang on: Britain could decide to leave the internet, couldn't it? That would keep all that nasty stuff out."
"Take back control of our internet" along with "Let's decide how to spend the £millions of fees we give to the W3C each year ourselves and free us from their burdensome 'standards' red tape."
Suggests she uses Google to lookup definitions of "Internet" so she can determine what level of idiocy her thoughts are on this, as long as she doesn't need those reference sites classified before she reads them, sigh.
Never thought I would say this but I hope Teresa May stays in the lead if this idiocy is how Leadsom thinks...actually with her way of thinking Leadsom would make a good running mate for Trump!
I have been wondering if the entire reason for the threat of Leadsom as PM was to make May look good by comparison. There is some danger that May's handlers can steer her into legalising the stasi state. Leadsom comes across as so bat-shit crazy that she would never support legislation that could actually get through the commons let alone the lords.
This is just badly thought through nonsense on so many levels. Will they be checking every single internet page in the world or just those that are hosted in England? And if it's just English ones, will they block everyone in England from accessing pages from outside the UK that haven't been rated by their censorship board? What about companies and consumers that do business over the web? What's to stop English people hosting in other countries?
This will never work in reality and the fact that these politicians have such a flimsy grasp of the modern world is scary enough but the fact that this person may end up Prime Minister just goes to show how messed up this Brexit vote has made the UK. With so much chaos someone is going to do something stupid and the things will turn nasty....
It doesn't work like that, the Prime Minister is merely "first among equals" so replacing one with another is purely an internal government matter and only requires the agreement of the Crown (which cannot normally be withheld).
The election among Conservative party members is for party leader, only convention dictates that party leader must be PM.
"The election among Conservative party members is for party leader, only convention dictates that party leader must be PM."
I understand the convention. However, that PM decides who does what job while that party is in Government, which then impacts on the lives of the people in the country.
The fact of the matter is when you go to vote, a lot of people vote by party or by PM. Those with no great interest in politics will vote for the man or woman they see on the TV who wants to lead their country, and vote accordingly. Whether this is right or wrong is beside the point. The fact remains that 36% of the 66% of the country who voted, voted for a Tory Government ran by David Cameron. They didn't vote for a Tory Government with any old clown in charge.
It should be the fact that any representative, at any level, should be voted for if the incumbent in office leaves their post.
Not calling general elections when the leader changes is established tradition and contributes to stability. Even if most leaders thus elected often lose the next election.
The real problem for the next PM is going to be getting a majority in parliament to do anything. In theory the government has a slender but working majority but this hasn't been borne out by the first twelve months of this parliament and doesn't look likely to get better. A new election, whether they want it (Leadsom might fancy a Tory / UKIP coalition) or not, is very likely.
Paddypower currently gives 6/4 for an election this year, and an even chance for 2020. I think the most successful candidate will be the one who changes his name to "None of the above".
We don't elect Prime Ministers in the UK, we elect a Government. The Government is formed from the party (or coalition) that gets more votes than any of the others. The Prime Minister by convention is the leader of that party.
This is in no way the first time this has happened, it has happened 7 times since 1945 (Churchill/Eden/Macmillan/Douglas Home, Wilson/Callaghan, Thatcher/Major, Blair/Brown)
We don't elect a government in the UK, we elect MPs. The Queen appoints the Prime Minister. She could chose who she likes, but by convention she selects whoever can command a majority in the Commons, possibly in coalition. This is usually the leader of the party with the greatest number of seats, but it doesn't have to be,
Democracy? We've heard of it.
-A.
That reminds me:
" ... I can think of plenty of reasons for people to want out of the EU, not least being the realisation that the EU is as likely to be persuaded to bring about internal reform and weed out corruption as FIFA is.
But all I was hearing was the line: “We don’t like unelected officials telling us what to do”. What unelected officials are these? “The European Commission,” they’d tell me.
Members of the European Commission are indeed nominated by something called the European Council but, I tried to explain, this Council comprises the European heads of state (elected by us), and even so, their choice is still subject to approval by a vote in the European Parliament (also elected by us). In fact, the head of the European Commission is directly elected by the European Parliament (who are elected by…? Oh yes, that’s right: us).
Electing the European Commission may not be a plebiscite but it is just the same as voting for a MP whose political party has decided that an off-shore money-laundering, tax-dodging toff should be Prime Minister whether you like it or not, only to ditch him barely a year later in favour some other imbecilic, dough-faced cunt."
Yep, that's from last week's A trip to the Twilight Zone with a support guy called Iron Maiden by our dear Dabbsy. Enlightening and almost prophetic.
I've got a better idea. Before we start classifying what the public can see, why don't we make all party political\election braodcasts and literature subject to the Advertising Standards Authority. .
At the very least Boris & Co would have had to repaint the "we send £350million" on the side of the bus, and Gorgeous George would have had to quote an error range on his "you'll be £4300 worse off" figure.
With over a billion sites out there, many of which have constantly changing content, how long does she think this will take to do and how will she do it?
Like most of the lackwits that think they should lead us, she has only a vague idea of how anything works but as Prime Minister she will have 'experts' to enable it all.
Or god of course!
My parental controls on my home wireless block sites that someone has deemed inappopriated for children. I can add or remove URLs on these lists.
Work web filters perform a similar task.
So it's basically unnecessary - those of us who care already use some form of filtering, Those who don't won't care about ratings anyway.
Yugguy,
indeed, but you are not a feckless parent who is incapable of actually using their brain and taking responsibility for their actions, hence you (and I, presumably quite a few commentards too) are the exception
So the rest of the plebs obviously need the Government to ensure they never see anything naughty (for a given definition of naughty) as clearly they aren't capable of making their own decisions...
This is apparently the 'Christian' thing to do [cue laughter]...
/sarcasm
"The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
Which leads to the why don't we use the "Bank of England" model and let teachers run schools, medics run hospitals and I.T. guys run I.T?????
Thondwe,
I hate to bust your bubble matey, but many medics/scientists DO run hospitals...
Which makes me wonder (anecdotal curiousity) why so many NHS trusts are cattle-trucked and are not very good at 'innovating' - granted I have painted with a broad brush but I suspect you get the gist!
From my experience (wifey is a senior physicist), 98% of the 'medics that manage' should have stuck to medicine, there are so many perfect examples of The Peter Principle in action it is genuinely scary...
Cheers,
Jay
My experience in education tends to make me think that it's more than Peter Principle. There are also some people who enter a profession with an intent to get promoted out of it.
So they tend to be good at doing and saying the things that get promotion - rather than being good at the job or the management they aspire to.
I cant see any good choice of leader in the Tory party. Partly because I dont pay too much attention to most of the party and because the main faces are not exactly promising.
However on a positive note the Tories will have fielded 2 female PM's while nobody else has fielded 1. Considering some of the guardian like articles I thought this would have been praised even if nothing else about them is.
Their current best choice announced his standing down.
Also why has the party which has boasted so much about equal rights for women only had a woman leader as a stand in until they could find a man to take over, then who did they choose?
Sorry two women PMs trump women only short lists.
I also think there will be a new PM post EU exit (if it happens) as the next few years will be toxic to the MPs involved, whoever that is I do not know, but both main parties have some interesting.
And it is depressing when May is best choice.
The definition of 'Female' here is rather loose, all be told - we're talking Politicians, not Nurses.
Empathy, compassion which I'd class as two strong female qualities, over men, seem completely lacking here. Actually, these candidates lack any of the qualities, I see everyday, in the female collegues around me. I'm in no way saying Micheal Gove was better either.
"I know we generally disagree (on the EU at least)"
Not necessarily. As I've written here a number of times the EU has a severe democratic deficit. Maybe we don't disagree about that. Maastricht and Lisbon should both have been validated by referenda in all countries - and not Irish style referenda of vote till you get the right answer. What might have passed such referenda would almost certainly have been very different to what happened; in fact we might still have just had the EEC as a trading arrangement.
However just walking out is economically daft and some of the areas which will catch the worst effects are those where foreign companies have set up so business so as to be in the EU and are major employers. Those seem to have voted leave - turkeys voting for Christmas. I also think that a referendum should require a large majority - another commentard mentioned the term "supermajority" - to effect a change in the status quo in such a major, permanent way. I'd also apply that to the unfortunately hypothetical referenda that should have validated the earlier treaties. Maybe we differ on those.
As to Blairalike that's been my term for him since he came to prominence. The Tories were so hypnotised by Blair that they went for the nearest thing in their own ranks. They could have done much better.
Firstly I will say that the current PM is much more preferable to the 5 shortlisted replacements. Not the greatest PM but not a disaster. And worked well in the coalition.
The 5 in the short list
Gove, er no
Welsh chap - bit too religious
Fox - bit right wing
Leadsom - so not trust at al
May - least worse
Leadsom is a dangerous fool
Finally, Ken Clarke comments, how honest and refreshing, why didn't he ever get selected for leader?
Maybe you're too young to remember his turn at the Treasury - back when things were going well for the economy.
I think he did a reasonable job after the mess that that the clowns Lawson and Lamont had left behind. He was incredibly quiet for the first six months, gave the BoE independence and was cautiously in favour of the single currency. The latter, whether you agree with it or not, was after considerable time in the job and not a crowd-pleaser.
Ken? Too nice?
Surely, you jest. Of Ken Clarke it was once said that he'd cross a street to join in a fight. Maggie reportedly enjoyed fights with him over agreement from the more supine members of her cabinet.
He ran twice and lost twice because the Conservative Party members are infamously out of touch with the electorate: average age is well over 60, income is well over average, etc. It's not a coincidence that the people he lost to subsequently went on to lose elections heavily.
Had he been elected leader he would no doubt have done the same kind of purging that John Smith did of the Labour Party and presumably what their next leader will have to do with Corbyn's Militant 2015 coterie.
That party forgets that the majority of voters like centre politics.
To a lot of people they saw Ken Clarke standing against some right wing knob. And what happens? Right wing knob gets selected and loses. As a voter I would like to have seen Ken Clarke up against Tony Blair as leader of opposition. A lot of people would have voted for a Ken over a IDS. But what do we know, we are only voters, not party members.
Then they select a reasonably central person - he becomes PM.
Please note parties, since the mid 1990s the government has been more or less central, keep it that way please, no lurching to the right, I prefer the more centre ground Conservatives to the hard line right.
As a voter I would like to have seen Ken Clarke up against Tony Blair as leader of opposition.
Indeed, he was one of the few Tories in Parliament to oppose the Iraq war, especially highlighting how Parliament had effectively been circumvented: "this House is being asked to vote on something, which has been decided elsewhere". Ted Heath did the same thing when Maggie was doing the same thing: Tory landowners still only see Parliament as at best a useful tool.
Funny how you don't see alleged guardians of parliamentary democracy like Rees-Mogg decrying the recent referendum as a farce.
how long it is before she rates and bans the bible
Its full of sex and violence and a major part of it is devoted to the torture and death of someone who spoke out against the system..
Then again, She may just censor the rest and leave those bits in as an example for us if we get out of line.........
"Nail 'em up I say, nail some sense into them"
Lets face it...if implemented (and badly)
This will end up a lazy fixed penalty fine system every time you mistakenly type in a URL that shouldn't be accessed (with the technical details of its operation/URLs kept hidden) if the (grey - not yellow) stealth Hadecs 3 Safety Camera* model of Policing, currently active on the M4/M25 is followed.
*Hadec 3 'Safety' Cameras now operating a strict enforcement of National Speed limits active 24/7 on the M4 in the UK (Avon and Somerset Police) , even when overhead Smart Motorway Gantries aren't lit. So much the unwritten rules, of a steady 80mph being acceptable (as put forward by Popular press), during off-peak hours / 'unrestricted' sections of Motorway - NOT ANY MORE.
The new world of autonomous Police harassment, via technology.
Odd, they spend millions on technology to implement this, but fail to erect a £50 sign to say 'Strict enforcement -Safety Cameras operating 27/4', just saying.
As already pointed out by Douglas Adams, "where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale.....".
As far as I know the film censors don't censor each film produced by amateur film makers in the UK.
They don't even censor home movies shown at film clubs.
They only censor commercially produced films for showing at a local cinema or for sale on DVD/BluRay or via Netflix and the like.
So the comparison doesn't scale - unless my home movies are due for a quick visit sometime soon to see if they are suitable for me to watch.
Given that they seem to have cut back on Trading Standards officers so much that the CAB is now standing in, I don't expect them to be doing anything realistic any time soon.
So the whole thing is a "Think about the children" sound bite no doubt followed by a cunning scheme to get somebody else to do the work so the Government doesn't have to spend any money (that shows up in the accounts).
As others have said, it is a sad time when we look at Cameron as a wise and effective elder statesman.
Again tracking other comments, how is it O.K. to have Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party without a general election, but not Theresa (for example) as leader of the Conservative Party without a general election? The current structure has the leader of the parliamentary party as PM and no rules about an election if the leader quits or is deposed.
Generally a sad time for us all.
Corbyn?
erm suppose to say was a G.E next week and 'tweedy' Corbyn was still Shadow PM then he would have been elected as the prospective PM wouldn't he...
Are you really suggesting the lumpen mass of the voting general public should express a preference as to whom they prefer as Shadow PM in between G.E's
So
1 - Every small business with a website will no longer have a website because of the cost
2 - As she could only enforce this on UK based websites she'll have to prevent people accessing non UK websites
The whole idea of putting no hopers like Gove and people further to the right than Ghengiz Khan, like Crabb & Leadsom, into the Tory leadership election is so that if May gets in it'll be see as a mercy and not the absolute clusterfuck of a disaster that it really is.
We'll be grateful if May, the far right securocrat with an emergency that allows her to push any legislation she likes through, wins because the other choices are far worse.
Movies have ratings.
Videogames too.
Internet should have ratings.
Age-rate all books, newspapers and mags as well. God-fearing ones get an automatic G (all ages). Unrateds? Burn them.
Children are thought of and civilization is saved!
I'd have thought AO should be penning articles putting forward the excellent views of such a prominent Leaver.
This idea from MP Adrea Leadsom can be rightly categorized s completely daft.
First of all, how are tens of millions of Websites on thousands of topics/genres, new, changed and/or updated daily going to be monitored and rated.
Furthermore the British Film Board, nor any other entity in the UK (or elsewhere) has the know-how or expertise to rate Websites for example - on climate change, Astronomy (NASA), technology in it's myriad categories, Sports related Websites, healthcare websites, and so on.
It looks like the Uk is getting politicians just as balmy as US Donald Trump.
There are now well over a billion websites and another couple of thousand have been added in the time it took you to read this sentence.
Spending just ten minutes checking each one would take one man over 19,000 years to work his way through them all.
And that's just the practicalities. Who gave her the right to decide what I can and can not view on the internet? Maybe she would be better employed working for the North Koreans.
After the choices you have "nominated" for PM, I don't evah want to hear one phoneme of bitching/whining/tut-tutting/etc about our choices for President. You have explicitly disqualified yourselves from any high ground (moral or otherwise) in that respect.
Having had a chance to read her Wicki page and a few other articles, this woman is disqualified from leading the country by virtue of her lying about her positions and experience in finance, particularly with Braclay's Bonk who are agents of the devil.
Then she admits to not only being a committed (should be) christian but also to taking part in Parliamentary bible studies groups, having a link to religion of any type as a beneficial character trait should automatically disqualify any would be leader. Hitler had his astrologer, Bush had his fundamentalist preacher, who knows who she will have as an 'Advisor'.
So no idea about how the real world works other than missing the good ol' days of being able to get out into the world on horseback with a couple of dozen of her chums to chase a small mammal that largely (in the countyside) keeps down rodent numbers and looks cute.
Usually while out on a hunt the morons will chase the fox wherever it goes including across a farmers crops, well, if he ain't a member of the hunt y'know!
And then there's May.....
Where I live we are looking at the possibiltyof a third GE this year, the voting public in Spain don't like any of the choices they are presented with, seems to be a thing this year.
So no idea about how the real world works
...to chase a small mammal that largely (in the countyside) keeps down rodent numbers and looks cute.
I'm sorry, but you also have no idea how the real world works if you come out with shit like that.
Foxes are a pest that kill enormous numbers of chickens and geese every year, they aren't just a cute little animal.
Yeah, the foxes shouldn't have any right to eat. Why not exterminate all wild animals from this island while we are at it? In other countries they have bears, lions, tigers etc, but in this one we can't accept some foxes. Pathetic.
Besides, if they are too many, just shoot some humanely and professionaly. Don't effing torture them for toff-"sport".
@anonymous boring coward
Yeah, the foxes shouldn't have any right to eat. Why not exterminate all wild animals from this island while we are at it? In other countries they have bears, lions, tigers etc, but in this one we can't accept some foxes. Pathetic.
Wow, Strawman much?
No, the foxes shouldn't have the right to eat farmed poultry, there's plenty of other things they could eat. I did not, and do not suggest exterminating them all, I've no idea where you got that from. And I don't support hunting, either.
Alister,
if I may chip-in, if Fox hunting is a sport, how many of the dogs/horses/riders have to get ripped to bits for the fox to have 'won'?
Sport it isn't, imho it is a moderately good reason to get dressed up and ride around the countryside, [potentially] killing a fox in the process.
Also I do live in the countryside, have neighbours who have lost chickens due to foxes, and have relatives who did hunt...
Regards,
Jay
@Jay,
I don't think I said anywhere that I support hunting, did I?
I was simply correcting ChrisG who said "a small mammal that largely (in the countyside) keeps down rodent numbers and looks cute"
This may be the townies view, but anyone who farms knows what a struggle it is to deal with foxes.
... and I think all politicians should be rated by the citizens and thrown in prison if they are determined to be crooks, thugs, liars, cheats, deceivers, enter into really bad deals and contracts, waste our money, etc.
Awe, screw the rating. They all deserve life-long prison sentences. Maybe a little Minority Report style look-ahead so we can catch these scumbags before they manage to reach office.
....how have politicians managed to "miss" the internet to such an extent that they still think it's some trendy new TV channel. Non nerds have been using it en mass since about 2000 and the average road sweeper appears to know more about how it works than people who are supposed to be running the country. Surely in the past 16 years this person must have used the bloody thing or manybe she has a "man who does" that sorts out all that tiresome data entry stuff.
"Of course they haven't missed it. They just want control of it."
In Sweden, som 20+ years ago, they politicians really looked at how to control what content was available to the web surfers. Not to protect children, but to protect the Swedish population from incorrect views.
The Social Democrats had traditionally had the press in their hands by having some really strange publication laws, as well as massive state contributions to newspapers that were deemed worthy. You can imagine how that put the lid on the papers being too critical of politicians.
Unlike China, Sweden didn't have the resources to build a Great Firewall.
This post has been deleted by its author
Would you run an article strap line that said "Maybe Allah Told him to do it" about Sadiq Khan?
If not, why run one that says "Maybe God Told her to do it".
I'm athiest, but find the double standards in left wing authors fucking disgraceful.
The person who wrote this would be off screaming "Islamaphobia" if anyone said the same thing about Islam with regards to a Muslim politician.
When she loses her bid for prime minister shortly, may be she should put her money where her mouth is and apply for that particular job vacancy, rather than just letting some peon destroy their own view of humanity, and probably their marriage and family relationships.
Book* tip: Alan Bennett - The Uncommon Reader. (If only, if only, if only... well, a man can dream.)
* Yes, I know, it's a bloody "novella".
During the referendum debate, I thought that Leadsom held the 'high-ground, by actually responding to questions in a dignified, non-dogmatic & unemotional way.
Shortly after she began coming out with talk about her 'religious' beliefs, along with other comments that made me change my opinion of her.
I'm sorry to say that, what was once a positive opinion of her, has now become a complete switch-off.
It's a sad thing to acknowledge, but the U.K is well & truly NOT served by any politician\party currently in existence.
I think perhaps that it's well past time that ALL politicians have a 'rating' given by the public, who can call time on them.
There are web site rating systems already in place from companies like Checkpoint and Cisco as part of their firewall services. In a modern web, with the advent of HTTP v2.0 and also with primarily randomized URLs, it would require application later inspection and filtering to implement such a system.
Even with data center scale computing, deploying clusters of tens of thousands for firewall instances, it would be computationally impossible to filter all we traffic effectively to make such a thing matter.
Add "dark web" resources (which I think means Tor) which simply requires the download of a free and public web browser to use and inline filtering would be absolutely impossible.
This sort of solution would depend instead on DNS filtering which doesn't work since most users don't actually use British DNS servers.
In the end, while she has a good heart and spirit and is trying to recommend something she believes could have a healthy and positive impact on her country, it would be simply wasted breath and resources to try and push such legislation into effect.
One has to wonder at the sanity of a person who would even suggest such a thing. Not even taking into account the morality of the enterprise and who would decide and what would be censored but purely from a practical point of view the logistics are simply impossible.
I have just worked out that it would take one man 19,000 years to check out every website even just spending a few minutes on each one.
I think she would be better employed doing the ironing and not worrying her pretty little head about running the country.
Whilst in theory, it may be a good idea... think of the children... but in reality it's ridiculous. There's just too many websites in existence (on the surface web) for this to work. if a 1,000 people working a 35 hour week (no breaks or anything) would take them until 2067 to rate all websites; assuming they take 5 minutes. that's not including all the numerous websites that would be added in that time.
This politician, just like all of them just demonstrates how out of touch they are with technology and the people they're supposed to represent
There was a web page rating system many years ago when the web was still in short trousers (1990s) called PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection). As far as I recall a significant flaw was the need for third party validation of the rating applied by the web developer and which came with a price tag.
Since then there have been numerous other rating and filtering systems but none that "tick all the boxes". Inevitably at some point a human is involved in making the filtering decision leading to sites being blocked for using the words for humans' organs of regeneration (so blocking legitimate medical sites) through to extremes like religious nuts blocking sites that suggest the world is older than 6000 years.
And this says nothing of the modern procedural web where content can be generated for any user on the fly, unique to each user. This makes rating pretty much impossible because no two viewers get the same thing.
PS. Looks like she ended up biting off more than she could chew. She's officially out which means a winner by default.
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