gizmoman

Another ex Labour guy. Maybe all the rejected Labour members should join a new party called Ex-Labour, a bit like when bands split up into different camps and you get 2 versions of the same band.

Would they? The result suggests maybe not, you thought people would still vote for Ali because he had the Labour name and he would still win, you were totally wrong there, a local independent who only decided to run 4 weeks ago got nearly 3 times as many votes. Will be funny if Galloway wins again. He clearly hates Starmer and is going to take shots at him every chance he gets.

Not even close, main parties thrashed, Azhar Ali (on the ballot as a Labour candidate) - 2,402 Mark Coleman (Independent) - 455 Simon Christopher Danczuk (Reform UK) - 1,968 Iain Donaldson (Liberal Democrats) - 2,164 Paul Simon Ellison (Conservative) - 3,731 George Galloway (Workers Party of Britain) - 12,335 Michael Howarth (Independent) - 246 William Leckie Howarth (Independent) - 523 Guy Nicholas Otten (Green) - 436 Ravin Rodent Subortna (Monster Raving Loony Party) - 209 David Anthony Tully (Independent) - 6,638 Doubt if Labour would have won even if they had campaigned.

Looks like you got your wish, Galloway thinks he's won comfortably, Independent David Tully has also done well so people have rejected the main parties. Starmer has dodged a bullet IMO, if he hadn't sacked Ali and they had lost to Galloway that would have been a real embarrassment, now he can just dismiss it as an irrelevant result since Labour didn't have a candidate.

I condemn all violence, Hamas and Israel, unlike you I have not chosen a side in this, both parties have acted barbarically, the innocent suffer, the whole situation is terrible but it is hardly a war of equals, Israel have the capability to destroy Palestine and it's people and it looks like that is their intention.

Is there anything that Israel could do that would get you to condemn them? If shooting unarmed desperately hungry civilians won't do it what will? It's amazing how people can turn a blind eye to death when certain ethnicities are involved yet they claim not to be racist.

Quite possibly, I'm sure it can be done properly but that isn't happening in the link NI posted, they are cutting down "old-growth", "Ecologist Michelle Connolly, from the British Columbia campaign group Conservation North, says making pellets from old forests can never be sustainable. "Old-growth forests in British Columbia are almost gone because of 70 years of logging to feed sawmills and pulp mills, and Drax is helping push our remaining ones off the cliff, along with our native biodiversity," she says." If we are to have green alternatives to existing energy sources we need to make sure they are properly green, not just scams designed to make people feel better.

Strangely enough I've never heard this before, common sense tells you it can't be right, makes you wonder what else is being taught in schools!

And people wonder why climate change activists get ignored, not content with exaggerating every threat, they post nonsense like this, how many dinosaurs would it take to produce a barrel of oil? It's total rubbish.

You miss my point, I understand the theory but how much CO2 does a mature tree absorb? How much does a younger smaller tree absorb? If you fell a 100 year old tree and burn it now that CO2 goes straight into the atmosphere, you might be able to mitigate that somewhat by planting a new tree but you would probably need to plant several for each one felled to make any difference in the short term. If you only plant one it will take years to remove from the atmosphere what you released by burning. To be truly carbon neutral you would have to plant the tree first, wait til it matures and then fell and burn it. That is not what is happening and so the CO2 levels will keep rising even using this scheme. You should also take into account the carbon cost of processing and transportation.

Utter lunacy, having to process wood pellets and shipping them halfway round the world to generate energy cannot be green and sustainable, they would have been better off burning local coal, burning wood still produces CO2 and there is no way planting a new tree replaces what would be absorbed by a mature tree and it seems they are not even doing that.

The Official Site, from the days when the festival had it's own forum.

This playground insult stuff is a bit tedious. Thought we had moved on from that.

900 years earlier than previous predictions, not much has changed but we live underwater.

I've no agenda, I was just pointing out the similarities between Navalny and Assange, both enemies of the (different) state, both locked up for years without due process, Navalny now dead, Assange may well suffer a similar fate.

And maybe you should be a bit more sceptical, a statement from a prosecutor is hardly a balanced view. "Injured party" who has determined there was an injured party? If it was a set up by the Americans you would expect a credible accusation, if the motive was to get him into custody in order to extradite the underlying accusation didn't matter, it could be dropped later. Sexual assaults are one of the hardest to prove and disprove, usually one persons word against another's, an ideal case for this. BTW there were 2 girls involved, why was only one referred to here?

The "rape" charges were just too convenient, clearly set up, Assange knew as soon as he was in custody for anything the US would extradite him, that is why he avoided custody in Sweden and tried to avoid it in the UK, no chance of a fair trial in the US, (or in the UK either if Neil got on the jury).

He has the gall to post that when Julian Assange has been held in prison in the UK for years on trumped up charges. Assange will likely die in prison in the freedom loving west for simply telling the truth. There is no difference in the brutality of either regime to it's dissidents.

You do realise that the "Sex Offender" criticism can be levied at all the political parties? For some reason politics attracts the worst in people. I won't bother to link a list of Labour sex offenders but I can assure you it will take a bit of reading, same for the Lib Dems and the Tories as well of course. When they're not indulging in questionable sex, most of them are thinking of ways to feather their nest, sad but but true, most of them are not worth voting for.

One point that the media never raise is the carbon footprint of the military, the worldwide production and deployment of weapons and military vehicles must be a major factor overall. If the burning of fossil fuels and the detonating of explosives has such a bad impact on the environment why are our leaders so keen to keep up military action? They have pledges to reduce CO2 but totally ignore them when it suits. No one ever calls out the polluting effects of war and military action. Having to rebuild destroyed countries has an incredible cost, carbon and financial. The military get a free pass and even though we are told EVs are the future I've yet to see an electric tank or armoured car! (not trying to ignore or minimise the human cost of war, that is horrific of course).

A vote for someone IS an endorsement, if there is no one on the ballot who will represent your views you shouldn't vote, we will never get better candidates until people are more selective with their support. The people of Rochdale certainly deserve better than the choices they have been given. If you vote for Ali you either don't care about his "Anti semitic" views, are willing to ignore them or actually support them. I suspect a lot of the electorate there will vote for him but that does mean Starmer's stance that these views are "unacceptable" is wrong, many people are going to accept them.

So if you lived in Rochdale who would you vote for? Genuinely interested, sounds like you would go with Ali even though he has been disowned.

Maybe, just think it's an interesting situation, If you were a hard core Starmer supporter, someone like Ozanne say, who would (could) you vote for? It's clear they don't want you to vote for Ali, they refuse to support him, best choice if you must vote would be an independent or Monster raving!

I suppose a lower than expected turnout would be a positive, if the electorate don't vote for the 3 ex-Labour guys but then overwhelmingly support the official Labour candidate at the GE then Starmer's position will seem right. OTOH a biggish vote now for a Labour reject shows people ignoring Starmer.

Everyone will know he's ex-Labour just like Galloway and Danczuk, so there is no Labour candidate, but voters will have a choice of 3 ex-Labour, none of whom are acceptable to the current Labour party. Starmer seems to be totally out of touch with the electorate, he wants to dictate to people how they should think and what is important, not listen to people and represent them. If these three collectively get a massive share of the vote (and I suspect they will) that is a big vote against Starmer.