I hope that’s shared out amongst everyone. If it’s a tax increase of £25bn each, I must admit that I may struggle to pay it.

I agree that “not voting for the Tories” was pretty much the main driver, but these are not “new options”.

The Brexit Party’s “surprise” increase this year, was in many ways just returning to the 10-15% that they received as UKIP in 2015.

In the two elections in between, they agreed to not contest many of the Tory seats, to not risk “splitting the vote” to help keep “evil Jeremy” out of power.

The Tory vote + Brexit Party vote, added together, is lower than the number who voted for either Boris Johnson, Theresa May or 2017 Jeremy Corbyn. Fewer people voted for Keir Starmer than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 or 2019 - so technically the biggest change in vote is probably “did not/unable to vote this year”, with an increase of 3 million.

As ever, “didn’t/unable to vote this year” won yet another successive landslide victory of about 20 million, or about the same as the top three parties added together.

Anyway, apologies for the tangent. The graph is particularly looking at younger people, who are on average more left leaning, and have become more so in the last 40 years. Though the recent mainstream politics/media shift towards the far right is absolutely terrifying, I don’t think it’s reflected in the young people shown in this graph.

The graph appears to show that from approximately 2010 (Libdem & Tory coalition) onwards for women, and a few years later (when we somehow got a full Tory government) for men, the younger people shown on the graph, said or thought something along the lines of “this Tory government is awful and we need to move in the opposite direction”.

Because if you don’t support Israel’s far-right government, the British right-wing press will call you “antisemetic” over everything you do for the next five years.

Is it a weird guilt thing?

I hated that song when the programme was new, but now I feel guilty about it, because someone was trying their best, and they wrote, re-wrote, edited and worked on that song and for every instrument and vocal, someone practised and practised and performed, and even if it wasn’t quite to my taste, it doesn’t mean it was bad, and I picture them still crying themselves to sleep at night, twenty years later, going “everyone hates the song I did for Star Trek Enterprise and now I hate myself”, so I make sure to watch the full intro so I don’t hurt their feelings.

That’s what everyone else does too, right?

“A Conservative spokesperson said: “Rishi Sunak as prime minister made it clear that we must stand up to extremism in all its forms.”

Whose slogan were they chanting, as they set fire to local shops and threw bricks and street furniture through hotel windows? I think it was “STOP THE BOATS! STOP THE BOATS!”.

I wonder what horrible far-right hatemonger put that into their heads?

I hope Rishi is going to help us find the vile extremists who invented and promoted this “stop the boats” slogan.

Perhaps whoever they are could be shipped off to Rwanda, which, as a landlocked country, doesn’t have much use for boats.

“The Eight” provisional list #1

1. Facebook
2. Apple
3. Google
4. Elon Musk
5. The Oil Industry
6. The people that Putin has incriminating blackmail videos of
7. The immortal demon priest and spirit of evil, Mumm-Ra (currently using the name “Rupert Murdoch”)
8. The Lizard People that David Icke warned us about

The list seems very incomplete, so I reckon there’s more than eight involved - but maybe the first four are all just puppets for the “Ask Jeeves” guy?

The sliver of petty vengeance in me quite enjoyed this bit:

“There are a load of MPs I thought I’d be spending decades with in this place,” said another. “They’re really good mates. And almost all of them are gone. It’s a reminder of how vulnerable we all are.”

Given that they were responsible for this (or worse) happening to hundreds of thousands of people over the last decade and a half, I wonder if there’ll be any life-changing realisations for any of them? What happens when a Tory learns about empathy?

I’m all for making “a truss” a term for “a period of seven weeks”, or “a bit less than two months”.

I fear I don’t have a lot of sway with the dictionary people, though.

I guess I’ll just start using it occasionally :)

Keir doesn’t count, he’s really done anything yet)

In only six and a half weeks from now, you can fairly compare Keir’s effectiveness against that of Liz Truss.

It wasn’t this one I was thinking of, but this will do just fine, thank you :)

Worth reading just for the “comments” column :)

Quick question - does anyone have the link to that “Tories being voted out” bingo card website? It was posted a few days ago, but I can’t find it.

[EDIT] Found it - Feddit thread - I’ve probably not formatted the link properly
Torygeddon Bingo Website

It’s a good plan, but it’s not different enough from his current appearance for anyone to notice.

There was a guy who was “famous” for having loads of plastic surgery to look like a Ken doll.

Perhaps Nigel could become “famous” for having loads of plastic surgery to look like Cyril Sneer from The Raccoons? He could carry on behaving like he already does.

• Is your local water company irresponsibly releasing sewage into your rivers?

• Are you struggling to find an environmentally sound liquid to throw over Nigel Farridge?

I wonder if there’s some sort of solution to both these problems? Perhaps there is a way to both help remove a small amount of sewage from the river and also find something to throw at Nigel?

Hmm…

Did you not hear about the bellend shortage?

There’s been an accident down at the knobhead factory, and output is currently so low, Britain’s news resources are in danger of failing to meet it’s quota of “knobheads and bellends saying things loudly”.

Thankfully, Nigel Farridge is there to save us.

Someone has kindly put the page on archive.is

He might have done a few surprisingly acceptable things as of late, but let’s not forget him destroying that schools building/repairing/upgrading project (which is why a large chunk of school buildings are now dangerous), then completely ruining secondary education with pointless, backwards reforms, loudly supporting and championing the destruction of the NHS to be replaced by a private subscription model etc…

His impact has generally been to meddle, alter, ruin and destroy, against the experience, knowledge, research and expertise of anyone who knows anything within the field and instead promoting wildly ill-thought-out early 20th century Tory whims because he’s “Had enough of listening to experts”.

Apologies for the rant, but he’s been high up on my “worst humans in the country” list for over a decade - though he’s been knocked down the list a little as of late, because who can compete with Mel Stride, Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman etc.

I just worry how 17% of people would think the Tories would support the NHS… almost 1 in 5 people thinking “yeah, they’re doing a great job” in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.