Verbal

None of the three twitterers in that article are Democrats. Louise Mensch is a former Tory MP, and Taylor and Schindler are registered Republicans. What they represent is a quite traditional Cold War wing of the Republican party, allied with a deferential stance towards what the call the 'IC' - the FBI, CIA NSA, etc. So for them, Trump is a monstrous offence for one thing only - the Russia thing, and his defence of Flynn and Manafort in particular. They've turned a story about Trump's inveterate corruption, and his dealings with equally corrupt lobbyists, into a story about Trump's non-existent traitorous Machiavellism. Nothing to do with 'liberals' and Democrats. Just another right-wing conspiracy theory which, like all conspiracy theories, tells you more about the 'theorists' than anything else.

He might say the same about you.

The cover of this week's Time magazine. This is pretty staggering. https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/865164921054666752 There's an animated version, with sound, that's even better (for those with better posting skills than me...)

Not just Gove. Maybot herself was at it this week as well. Since when was incompetence evidence of 'strong and stable' government? And as for the Tory party manifesto - talk about missing an open goal. It's a truly terrible piece of work that in any other election would have Tory candidates watching the polls with their nails bitten down to their wrists. As it is, May's missed open goal is easily than matched by Corbyn's and his front-bench's repeated own goals.

The Corbynists are getting their excuses in early. There's already widespread paranoia among the more fanatical doe-eyed dimwits about the 'MSM' having fixed the election. Now, Len McCluskey, the de facto muscle behind Corbyn, is saying that if Labour wins 200 seats that will be a - I quote - 'success'. It will also be the worst electoral result for Labour since the 1930s. Some success. It's clear now that the Corbynistas aren't even pretending they can win a majority, or come remotely close to the number of seats they presently have. So McCuskey's intervention is merely part of a strategy to keep Corbyn in power until a rule change at the September party conference will ensure a locked-in and permanent majority for Corbynism, regardless of who the actual leader is. En Marche.

Yes, you're right. Nit combs and sun creams have brought the NHS to its knees. God only knows what the backlash will be like when NHS managers finally get around to rationing them - if they dare.

This is a common fallacy. The reason that such a small percentage of the population in the UK pay such a large proportion of taxes is because we live in a staggeringly unequal society, where historically unprecedented piles of cash and assets are held by the wealthy. It's also distorted by blatantly regressive taxes on other things than income - taxes that penalise the poor and favour the rich. VAT is a huge tax burden on the poor as a proportion of weekly income, and a negligible one on the wealthy. Property (council) tax is absolutely minuscule for the wealthy (£1500 a year for a £50 million mansion in Mayfair) and a severe burden on the poor (most in the private rental sector pay it, not just property owners). Taxes are so regressive that even the land of the free can, in a very few respects, look more equitable than us. Take a look at annual property taxes in the US if you want to see how 'lucky' wealthy property owners in the UK really are.

It's all just gone seriously south for Trump. The Washington Post has revealed that he stupidly shared highly classified information - the highest classification of all - about ISIS with the Russians in the controversial Oval Office meeting the other day. In so doing he's badly compromised 'an ally', presumably in the Middle East. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?tid=a_breakingnews&utm_term=.90fd0e184349 One thing is for certain - Trump is now firmly heading towards impeachment. Bets on when he's out? I'd guess early 2018. And Russia will be the cause of it.

Today's YouGov poll makes grim reading. It breaks down Tory vs Labour support by region - and Labour is ahead in only two of those, London and the north east. The map is basically blue with just two tiny patches of red. Corbynists remain convinced of two things: that no one has ever been given a chance to vote on a proper socialist manifesto (forgetting 1983, and the disaster that followed); and that the polls are always wrong (forgetting that when they are they always over-estimate the Labour vote). I honestly don't know why May bothers leaving home during the election - it's that easy. https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/05/15/voting-intention-regional-breakdown-apr-24-may-5/

This is the wrong circle to suddenly divert to. The number of doe-eyed Corbynists on here is limited to fanboy. Corbyn's appointment of Murray is exactly the kind of thing many in the Labour party deeply resent. He only joined the party in November 2016 after resigning his Communist party membership. It's just another sign of the utter uselessness of Corbyn that he would offer such an easy target for the Tories to attack. Just to be clear about how repulsive Murray is, he has argued that the deluded backing of Stalinism by British communists was defensible - even through the Great Terror of the 1930s and the show trials of the 1950s (many against 'Zionist' - i.e. Jewish - opponents). The real value of Murray to Corbyn is that Murray is a senior figure at UNITE, Corbyn's main financial backer - Murray doesn't even work for Labour, despite being in charge of the election; he's merely on secondment from the union. Again, it's an easy target for the Tories in their narrative that the party is being led by the nose by union bosses. So back to those wages...

So what's your prediction, fanboy? Corbyn going to sweep into No10 with all those shy socialist votes?

A clue, as ever, is in what lie is being told on the campaign buses. On the Tory bus, there's only mention of May, not of the party she leads. On the Labour bus, there's only mention of Labour, not of the party leader. The Tories know their party brand is toxic to many former Labour voters, so the appeal is to vote for her rather than the Nasty Party. Labour know their leader is toxic, so the appeal is to traditional loyalties rather than to the wholly inadequate party leader. The Tories know they'll win if they keep to this message because May's appeal transcends the party base. Labour know they won't win so are appealing to their traditional party base not to desert them. For the Tories, the aim is to win an election. For the Corbynists, the aim is to be close to Miliband's share of the vote so that Corbyn can make the awe-inspiring claim he's not terminally toxic. However you look at this - whether you're a supporter of May or are horrified by her - she's going to win big, and win with effectively one-party control over British politics: A) because she's popular, and B) because Corbyn would rather be the Tory party's historic enabler than relinquish power.

To be fair to Lord Pony - and he really doesn't warrant it - I think he's referring to the Left's rosy view of a forever-lost NHS that was once entirely in public ownership and didn't suffer from shortages (of beds, medicines, doctors, nurses, ambulances...). In fact, that NHS has never existed. The rest of his post is pony, but there you go. The leaked Labour manifesto - on the details so far - appears to make no policy commitments on the NHS at all. And all in a draft manifesto that's trying to play the populist card. The only proposal I've heard so far involves banning car parking charges on hospital grounds - hardly ground-breaking, Blue Skies stuff. What must almightily puzzle Corbyn and his Momentum chums is that they know that individual policies seem to be popular (nationalising railways for example - although they have absolutely no idea how to do this). Their problem is they're playing a silly game of arithmetic. Add in enough popular/populist ideas and - hey presto - the electorate swings in your direction. One problem they either don't see or gloss over is that there's no coherent vision and narrative of a better society that underlies these measures, other than a peevish sense of grievance and a desire to punish the one percenters. A bigger one is that they have a leader completely lacking in the intellectual capabilities, the organisational skills and the charismatic authority to weave these ideas into a convincing political narrative. What Corbyn does bring to the table is, oddly, the one big character flaw he shares with Tony Blair. Both believe in the politically narcissistic idea that if one has good intentions the outcomes will also be good. Blair was informed by a suppurating religiosity, which made him believe that his good-guy actions and outcomes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone could be writ large in Iraq. Corbyn is informed by a staggering political naiveté that amounts to: 'why can't we just all get along?' And if only his way of thinking were the guiding principle in political crises, the world would be a better place. What both Blair and Corbyn fail - for all their ill-judged self-belief - to grasp is that there is something called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Or put another way, reality bites back. More able politicians - like Merkel - understand that how to negotiate reality without reducing everything to realpolitik. In the past, Labour has understood this well too (and has consequently produced much social change for the good). With Corbyn there is no hope. Nor will there be in the near future. Roll on a British En Marche!

Agree, an interesting story. A better comparison might be the NHS with the bits of the US health system that are public. I spent a couple of days in the ER in LA County Hospital a few years ago. Some of the people I saw in the waiting room on day one were still there on day two. The quality of care itself was top class - the senior trauma surgeon there is an acknowledged world leading researcher in treating multiple and extreme injuries. But the sheer sense of despair among uninsured people seeking help was overwhelming. And all in a hospital waiting room which included a feature you won't find in your typical A&E - a set of cells for treating a steady stream prisoners injured in the local jail. A&E in NHS by comparison is quick, efficient, and friendly, even when it's dealing with the Saturday night intake. But all this raises a problem politically. Every election, the arguments about the NHS are wound up to fever pitch. It is supposedly crumbling, duplicitous (when pursuing closures) and increasingly privatised (Labour), or it is in need of endless amounts of reform, making doctors more 'responsive' to their customers (Tories). All of which corrodes morale in a service that depends more than anything on the idea that medical care is a public good and that treating patients is a calling. Both sides are wrong. Labour is wrong, because the NHS has always, from its birth, been a compromise, allowing private care to operate within hospitals (without it, the NHS would never have got off the ground, because of a long stand-off between the '45 Labour government and the BMA). And the Tories are wrong, because endless managerialist reforms have already damaged the very thing the NHS exists to do. So the irony is that the NHS is both a sacred cow and a political football. And the consequence is that we can't have a reasoned, informed, reflective national discussion about what we want the NHS to be. We're trapped between the false nostalgia of the Labour party and the managerialist obsessions of the Tories Yet that discussion urgently needs to take place - without the tribal rancour of the main political parties vying to the ones with whom the NHS is supposedly - and really not - 'safe'.

Great win by Macron yesterday, made even better by a Farage tantrum-sulk: "Macron offers five more years of failure, more power to the EU and a continuation of open borders. If Marine sticks in there, she can win in 2022." You lost Nigel, suck it up. The will of the people has spoken. Nige's Brexit campaign also tweeted yesterday, claiming the French voters, in not supporting Le Pen, had capitulated, just as they had to Hitler. Which is weird, because it places these British bulldogs firmly on the side of the neo-Nazis. Vichy would presumably therefore have been full of little Brexiteers.

As you appear to be a fully paid up (all £3 of it) member of the cult, I'll give you the only answer you'll understand. As someone who thinks Corbyn is ****, which makes me in your odd little mind a Red Tory and therefore an actual Tory, I'm voting for the abolition of the NHS, the removal of any minimum wage, the repeal of the Equality Act, the reduction to all unemployment benefits to zero, and the demolition of all council housing that's not been right-to-bought.

Not really. The Tories are prisoners of the referendum result, not UKIP. Without question, or sensible opposition, she'll get her thumping majority, which will make precisely zero difference in negotiations with the EU (how this non sequitur got any traction I've no idea). The really important question is what happens in the two years after the election. The EU are absolutely united, whatever the cost, in making sure she gets a bad Brexit. The problem for her is she'll own it as far as the electorate is concerned. Provided Labour has ditched the Quisling Jesus and his cult - and quickly - there will be a way back by profiting from the backlash.

There's only one way for Labour to close the gap on the Tories before 8 June - and that's for Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott to resign now. Not only will that not happen, of course, but Corbyn is gearing up for the only fight ahead that interests him: not 8 June, but the Labour leadership election that will follow the disaster. The day after Corbyn hands over complete unchallengeable power to one of the most dangerous Tory governments on record, he'll look forward to diving into the warm embrace of the three-quid recreational 'socialists' and get himself the only thumping majority that matters. The very definition of a death spiral.

Corbyn's Labour party have been all but wiped out as the governing party in the English counties, and Labour have lost control of Glasgow for the first time in 40 years. The most deprived ward in the entire UK (in supposedly Tory-unfriendly Scotland) has gone from Labour to Tory. Still, all this will change when voters get to know Corbyn better. (Corbyn's own reaction to the disaster was to call himself 'Monsieur Zen'). And if not, the cult can always wheel out Diane Abbott to make stuff up. This, from her, on ITN earlier today: Abbott: 'The net losses are about 50.' ITN: 'They're 125.' Abbott: 'Well the last time I looked they were about 100.' Brilliant.

Apparently not. The cult leadership is delighted with the results so far. McDonnell has just told Sky News that the party's losses are "not as bad as some were predicting." Far more important to defeat the psephologists than the Tories.

According to the Financial Times, Tory Party Central Office has been phoning the BBC to complain that Corbyn is not being given enough air time. Corbyn has been largely invisible in key local election battlegrounds, which is presumably by Labour party design. Is any of this normal?

This extra leverage that May thinks she's going to get from having an inevitably thumping Parliamentary majority is going to work wonders in bringing the EU to heel. This would be the same EU that fell straight into line when Syriza went and collected its own thumping majority in Greece, and then ended up with a worse deal than the one on offer before their election. That showed 'em.

Well that didn't last long. May has gone from 'strong and stable' to 'rattled and unhinged'. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-general-election-brexit-eu-countries-influence-uk-with-leaks-a7715851.html

This obsession with demanding a 'simple yes or no' on whether we should have nuclear annihilation is freakishly bizarre. [video=youtube;3z-a5hy7QO8]

Diane Abbott's offence isn't that she's some kind of racist. It's that she's blisteringly incompetent. And so it goes with a number of other Corbynist frontbenchers. The tragedy is that a lot of Labour's policies - including the one Abbott was mumbling about yesterday - are popular with voters. But so long as these policies are espoused by politicians who see an interviewer's trap - really not an easy one to miss: 'how much does it cost?' - and dive straight into it, Labour doesn't have a prayer of holding on to much outside English cities. And the primus inter pares of air-headed uselessness is Corbyn himself, who thought Abbott's performance was just fine. Labour are coming to represent what they actually are on the frontbench - middle class metros with overwhelmingly public sector jobs, secure pensions, and a glut of signalled virtues. That's a pretty narrow, self-congratulatory constituency, worthy only of a party determined to test Disney's theory about lemmings. The greater tragedy is that we need a functioning opposition as never before, but we're going to be left with the Dictatorship of the Maybot, which has its own cliff to leap from.