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Not sure where you are coming from but it's only just over two hours from Euston to Lime Street.
If you base yourself in the centre, you can reach the racetrack by Merseyrail on the Ormskirk line, stopping at Aintree.
If you have time, it's worth having a look around the centre, especially St George's Hall and the Waterfront, with galleries, museums and the Three Graces.
I don't know about anyone else but, with recent developments and with 45% of people in a YouGov survey saying they would support requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave, I have been going out of my way in my dealings with black, brown or eastern European people to be as polite, smiley and friendly as possible.
I'm like that anyway in my dealings with people anyway but I have lifted it up a notch in recent months because I want to make them think I am not one of the 45%.
If you'd been keeping up, you would have seen I posted this on another thread yesterday.
On misinformation, the Guardian is reporting this.
"The Metropolitan police has had to counter false suggestions by the artificial intelligence on Elon Musk’s X platform that the force passed off footage from 2020 as being from Saturday’s far-right rally in the city.
The claim by the chatbot Grok was in answer to an X user’s query about where and when footage of police clashing with crowds was filmed.
Grok, which has had a track record of giving false and misleading answers, replied: “This footage appears to be from an anti-lockdown protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on 26 September 2020, during clashes between demonstrators and police over Covid restrictions.”
The answer was quickly picked up and amplified by X users, including the Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who tweeted: “This was my suspicion,” before asking: “Did the Met claim footage of clashes in summer 2020 took place yesterday?”
The Met responded to her by saying that the footage was filmed on Saturday shortly before 3pm at the junction of Whitehall and Horse Guards Avenue.
“It is quite obviously not Trafalgar Square as is suggested in the AI response you have referenced, but for the avoidance of further doubt we have provided a labelled comparison to confirm the location,” the force added.
As I said on that post, what a sick world we live in. And here's further evidence of misinformation circulating about.
The Express (not renowned for downplaying things on this type of issue) employed an expert in the estimate of crowd sizes and he came to the conclusion there were less than 100,000.
I don't think Michael Crick thought the process was quite as benign as you suggest.
Here's something from 2023.
"Michael Crick is at work on one of the most vital, and neglected, topics in politics: the selection of parliamentary candidates in winnable seats.
“These are effectively Britain’s hidden elections,” he says in this interview. “These are the equivalent of the primaries.”
The Conservatives have barely begun to select, so Crick has so far concentrated on the 100 Labour selections which have taken place, publishing his findings day by day and hour by hour on Twitter on @Tomorrow’sMPs.
Some of these prospective MPs will probably within a few years be running the country, yet almost no attention has been devoted to how they are chosen.
Crick describes the “purge” of Labour candidates which is being conducted by the party’s National Executive Committee: “the Labour Left has been utterly annihilated,” and so too has “anybody with a strong trade union background”, but the powers that be “don’t do it in a very professional manner in my view”.
The purge, he warns, has gone so far that Angela Rayner, Robin Cook and Neil Kinnock would not now be able to gain selection as Labour candidates."
There was a time when what was then called repatriation was largely confined to supporters of the National Front.
That makes the findings of a recent YouGov survey rather alarming because 45% of people supported the removal of large numbers of people who have come to the UK in recent years. The survey also indicated that ignorance about the level of illegal migration may be playing a part in such attitudes.
Here are some extracts from the narrative on the polling.
"Polling on immigration typically focusses on attitudes towards the level of new arrivals. But polls rarely cover another possibility of public opinion – that not only do people want immigration highly curtailed, but that they might also want to see large-scale removals of migrants.
A new YouGov poll testing attitudes to several immigration scenarios has found that almost half of Britons (45%) say they would support “admitting no more new migrants, and requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave” – a figure which rises to 86% of Reform UK voters, but also encompasses sizeable minorities of Labour and Lib Dem voters (27% apiece).
On the face of it, this is an extraordinary finding, coming as it does at a time when immigration is a key focus of government and public attention. However, a more detailed examination of attitudes shows a nuanced picture, suggesting that much of this apparent hostility may stem from a simple misconception.
Are more migrants in the UK legally or illegally?
Key to understanding this finding is the belief among the public that immigration to the UK is primarily ‘illegal’ rather than ‘legal’. Our research shows that almost half of Britons (47%) think there are more migrants staying in the UK illegally rather than legally, including fully a third of the public (32%) who think the illegal figure is “much higher”.
Crucially, this view is held by 72% of those who want to see mass removals. However, these perceptions appear to be wide of the mark.
Estimates of the population of illegal migrants living in the UK range from 120,000 to 1.3 million, with Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf recently putting the figure at 1.2 million.
Regardless of which figure from this range is chosen, it does not come close to the number of migrants living in the UK legally, with 2021/2022 census data putting the entire foreign-born population of the UK at 10.7 million."
Candidate selection (and thus the potential candidates put to local members) is now controlled by the central party.
At the last election only one left wing candidate made it through, and even they were kicked out just before the election.
Having said that, I think that if Burnham put himself forward (especially in the Manchester area), it would be difficult for the party to prevent him being put to the local membership.
Talking of heroes, the obituary of the last surviving combatant to have won the Victoria Cross was in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, although he didn't serve in the RAF until a bit later in the war.
I wasn't commenting on what you have said on this thread as I have deliberately chosen not to get too involved, so am not sure what you have said. Indeed, I have on a couple of occasions expressed my surprise at the length of this thread which I see has now made it to 20 pages.
As regards tribes (and not all people are particularly political), there is an increasing number in this country with the breakdown of the two-party system, so I don't things are as simple as one side and the other.
Finally, by prolific I probably meant more that (like me) you appear to like to have the last word, so I tend not to engage.
As I mentioned on another thread the intention is to get people focused on emotional trigger issues, and side-track the issues (such as health and social services) that really affect people's lives.
I was thinking yesterday much the same as the sentiments in your last paragraph.
But as the saying goes, you can't let the b*ggers win.
EDIT: one positive step might be to donate to Hope Not Hate who do sterling work in this area.
And here's Billy Bragg on the Sheffield leg of his Hope Not Hate tour last year, a couple of days after I saw him at the Islington leg, playing the song that was the highlight of the gig for me.
You can be active with the activists Or sleep in with the sleepers While you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.
"What I saw at Saturday’s rally was racism, pure and simple. Labour won’t tackle it until we can call it what it is
Silence about the bigotry inherent in events like Tommy Robinson’s march will be seen by the thugs as tacit approval of their message
I have been on a great many political marches in my time. But Saturday’s rally, facing up to Tommy Robinson’s 110,000-strong “unite the kingdom” march in London, was the only one where I actually felt threatened.
I was on the anti-racist counter march and we were outnumbered 20 to one. This was startling: on anti-racist marches, we usually easily outnumber the racists. The march organised by Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was billed as “a free speech rally”, but free speech in this case seemed to mean people saying anything they wanted about only one subject: immigration.
Some commentators like to say that mobilisations such as this are only expressions of discontent by people who feel a little ignored. If they had been in central London on Saturday and seen the sea of men (and they were nearly all men) defiantly waving their St George’s flags, some of them attacking the police and spitting at people like me, they might want to reconsider that view. The kind of people who were marching usually take exception to being called racists. But it is hard to know what else to call those of them who gathered in the capital to demand mass deportation and insist that black and brown men are a unique threat to white women.
The huge turnout for Robinson’s march was partly a consequence of the online world we now live in. Social media have made this scale of mobilisation so much easier. But discussing the march afterwards with others from the anti-racist rally, we had the sense that there is something dark bubbling up in British society. Organisations that support the victims of race hate crime say that the number of cases is shooting up. Ugly incidents are increasing – only this weekend, in the West Midlands, a Sikh woman was reportedly raped in broad daylight by white men shouting racist abuse including “you don’t belong in this country, get out”."
Interesting to hear Chris Patten on LBC earlier today who condemned Trump and yesterday's march out of hand. Sadly, such voices in the the Tory Party are few and far between these days given the party is going down the Trumpian route.
On misinformation, the Guardian is reporting this.
"The Metropolitan police has had to counter false suggestions by the artificial intelligence on Elon Musk’s X platform that the force passed off footage from 2020 as being from Saturday’s far-right rally in the city.
The claim by the chatbot Grok was in answer to an X user’s query about where and when footage of police clashing with crowds was filmed.
Grok, which has had a track record of giving false and misleading answers, replied: “This footage appears to be from an anti-lockdown protest in London’s Trafalgar Square on 26 September 2020, during clashes between demonstrators and police over Covid restrictions.”
The answer was quickly picked up and amplified by X users, including the Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who tweeted: “This was my suspicion,” before asking: “Did the Met claim footage of clashes in summer 2020 took place yesterday?”
The Met responded to her by saying that the footage was filmed on Saturday shortly before 3pm at the junction of Whitehall and Horse Guards Avenue.
“It is quite obviously not Trafalgar Square as is suggested in the AI response you have referenced, but for the avoidance of further doubt we have provided a labelled comparison to confirm the location,” the force added.
I've mentioned before that misinformation and ignorance plays a big part in attitudes to immigration and came across the following in an article in today's Observer.
"It is known in Whitehall as the “chicken nugget debacle”. An Albanian criminal had supposedly avoided deportation because his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets.
Kemi Badenoch cited the widely reported case as an example of how the European convention on human rights (ECHR) “is weaponised by those who wish to erode our national identity and border security”. Nigel Farage said: “You read this stuff and you just want to cry.”
Except it never happened. There was no ruling that the foreign offender should be allowed to stay in Britain because his child was a picky eater. An immigration tribunal did initially decide that it would be “unduly harsh” for the boy to be sent to Albania because of his special educational needs, but this judgment was later overturned. A more senior judge rejected the man’s appeal and made absolutely clear that an aversion to chicken nuggets should never be enough to prevent deportation.
This was not an isolated case. There was the Iranian criminal “spared deportation so he can cut his son’s hair”, the mass murderer who claimed that having access to hardcore porn was his human right and the Afghan migrant who could not be extradited to Belgium “because of mosquitoes” in the prison.
The political debate around human rights law is shot through with myths and misinformation, going back to former prime minister Theresa May’s suggestion in 2011 that an illegal immigrant could not be deported because “he had a pet cat”. In fact, the critical factor was his long-term partner."
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