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It's quite baffling that there are people out there who think that Labour are going to sweep into power on the back of a massive popular vote, 1997 style.
They're going to win because at the moment they are the least worst option. There are simply no indicators to suggest otherwise.
I think he'd love to be PM. He wouldn't have the first idea what to do when he got there and he'd spend most of the time blaming everything and anyone else for his failures, but he absolutely wants the job.
If my experience has taught me anything, it's that benefit fraud is much higher than official statistics suggest, and a lot lower than the Daily Mail would have you believe. I can't go into any more depth than that.
Again in my experience very few refugees end up on benefits in the long term. Most end up in some form of work quite quickly. How legit that work is and how much tax is paid on it I can't say.
Farage has his playbook and he's running it. There are more than enough stupid people to fall for it.
The major cause of the angst that sees the rise of the likes of Farage is when the net is too large, not too small.
I think most people understand and even support the need for a social support system in place to help those in need. Yes, there are the extremists who would get rid of it all, but they are a tiny minority.
The problems happen when people see that safety net being abused. Most people will have a story about the neighbour or family member who has never worked but has a nice new car, Sky TV and three holidays a year. People will also have questions about the ability of the system to support tens of thousands of new arrivals every year, arrivals who often disappear into the dark economy.
When they are told that such concerns are racist or bigoted, you're just playing into the hands of Farage and his aping of the Trump technique.
Not many employers "advertise via JobcentrePlus" these days at all. As a department the emphasis has shifted firmly away from vacancy handling and job matching to benefit conditionality monitoring and employability support. We still get some stuff in, but it's a fraction of what it used to be, when one of my first jobs every day was to pull all the cards down off the board and check that the vacancy was still live on our system.
These days it's a hell of a lot easier for companies to handle their own job advertisements themselves instead of getting us to do it. Recruitment agencies too are far less numerous than they used to be. It's just the way that the labour market has changed since the inception of the internet.
Anyone who has paid any attention to the by-elections that have happened over the last couple of years could tell you this. Labours vote has barely increased anywhere. It's even gone down in a few places.
There will be those who voted Labour during the Corbyn years and bumped up their numbers in polling who have now switched to the Greens, and some will no doubt attach themselves to their local Ronnie Job types. Very, very few who voted for the Tories under Johnson have swapped to Labour. They're either not voting at all or going to Reform.
Labour will win because the Conservative vote has collapsed, not because theirs has grown.
The problem is that "capitalism" has been humanity's default setting for Millennia, and even today remains the most effective way of raising living standards across the World. At what cost it does so remains open to debate, but probably at a lower cost than every other system that we've tried above small tribe or village level.
We need to get more and more investors (migrants) to join the scheme in order to support those who got in early. What happens when those brought in in turn need to be supported goes unanswered. Growth is finite, whether economic or population. There are limits to what can be supported from a numerical basis, never mind the cultural issues that will inevitably result from cramming so many incompatible mantras together.
This goes back to a point I made earlier about pension provision. If people want to be able to retire at 60 then they need to start saving for their pensions when still basically embryos in the current system. The whole thing needs a serious looking at.
It's a fairly well established fact that for decades Wales away games have functioned as an excuse for Cardiff Neanderthals to go hunting for supporters of other clubs team handed. Mostly Jacks.
Most will behave themselves, but unfortunately a sizeable minority lack the cognitive capacity to behave in any other way.
I'm not sure what it must be like to go through life as chock full of hate as these people are but it can't be pleasant, even if they don't realise it.
I've got no patience for these gatekeepers of what is and is not Welsh.
My Grandad was from Northampton. My Granny's family came over from Devon in the 1800's. My girlfriend's father came from the Northeast and was vaguely related to Bobby Charlton. My cousin used to be chairman of the Millwall supporters club. He has tattoos of both the Welsh and English flags to honour his parents. Am I supposed to hate England?
Guaranteed that if you look at the family history of these "Proud Welshmen" you won't have to go back more than a couple of generations to find English blood. It's all a bit pathetic.
Watching England is very much like watching the Swans under Cooper. Dull tournament football that feels like the team is deliberately being sent out with one arm tied behind its back.
As time goes on and it becomes even more obvious that many of the lockdown measures were excessive and unnecessary people may even grow to dislike Johnson even more.
Prevented from leaving the house or attending to loved ones for no real reason whilst those in charge basically carried on as per usual. Not that Boris was alone in that (Neil Ferguson was another "do as I say not as I do" type) but as PM he should have known better.
Ironically if he had had the stones to stick to the actual pandemic plan drawn up beforehand much like Sweden did instead of cravenly submitting to the howls of outrage from elsewhere then he might still be Prime Minister now and the UK economy in significantly better shape.
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