david

Yeah, Pret a Manger has a reputation for being expensive and pretentious, whereas Greggs has a reputation for being cheap and unpretentious.

The point of Betteridge's law isn't really that they're false, it's that the editor hasn't got the evidence that it's true because if they did it wouldn't be a question.

In this case it's a hard no. The main threat to Labour isn't the greens it's people thinking it's a forgone conclusion and not voting, the new constituencies that reduce the number of city seats because poor people register to vote less than others, which reduces the number of Labour MPs, voter disenfranchisement, the Conservative Party election machine which will narrow the polls as we go through the weeks and biased coverage from the print and broadcast media.

Last night a BBC report on the election has several minutes covering Rishi's "energetic" election campaign with plenty of clips of him claiming to like talking to people, then a single soundbite from each of Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and Reform followed by a still of Keir Starmer with a voice over saying he was campaigning too and then a one minute segment on controversy once Diane Abbot. The message was "Rishi is working hard to meet lots of ordinary people, here's some quotes for balance, and Labour are divided." I think the Conservatives are far more divided and that Labour will work far harder for ordinary people, but I'm not a conservative donor who's been appointed to make editorial decisions about BBC politics, so what would I know?

No.

Wikipedia: Betteridge's law of headlines

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.

History
Betteridge's name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous TechCrunch article that carried the headline "Did Last . fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?" (Schonfeld 2009):

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don't actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

A similar observation was made by British newspaper editor Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade, among Marr's suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles:

If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'.

Clues: former Chancellor in multi-million pound tax avoidance scandal: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/nadhim-zahawi-sacked-tory-party-chair-tax-affairs-rishi-sunak

Reminder: all this incorrect fuss about a potential couple of thousands of tax is just to distract from the former actual Conservative Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi having to settle an unpaid tax dispute from HMRC of how much now? An estimated £5,000,000. Yes, five million pounds.

And he breached the ministerial code three times that I know of: he didn't declare to officials that he was under investigation by HMRC when he was appointed Chancellor by Conservative Chancer-in-Chief Boris Johnson, he didn't declare that he'd paid a settlement for tax avoidance when he was appointed to cabinet by Conservative Economy-Crasher-in-Chief Liz Truss, nor when appointed again by Conservative Chaos-and-Non-Chief Rishi Sunak.

£5,000,000. When ordinary folk don't pay their taxes, it's called tax evasion, it's a crime, and you go to prison. When rich people don't pay tax, it's called tax avoidance, and if they're found out as breaking the rules, they pay a bit more than they would have done and no-one goes to prison.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/nadhim-zahawi-sacked-tory-party-chair-tax-affairs-rishi-sunak https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/15/nadhim-zahawi-to-pay-millions-in-tax-after-dispute-over-family-finances

I hope James Daly loses his seat in Parliament. Permanently.

Funded by cracking down on tax swerving?! They've had 14 years to crack down on tax avoidance and tax evasion. Guess what they've never done! Guess WHY.

"Some of you may die,
but it's a sacrifice
I'm willing to make."

Thanks Rishi.

Why do people use the word "Tory" when criticising the Conservative Party? The word Tory won't appear on the ballot paper and has a meaning from another century and I'm sure most people don't get the reference.

The Conservative Party trashed the economy with Trussonimics.

The Conservative Party kept wages low.

The Conservative Party partied in breach of covid rules they had made, the night before the Queen followed them and mourned alone.

The Conservative Party loves austerity and making poor people pay for the financial mismanagement of the rich.

The Conservative Party doesn't have any good ideas that would make the country any better.

The Conservative Party ran the NHS into the ground long before covid and disbanded the epidemic preparatory unit shortly before covid struck.

The Conservative Party took the opportunity of the pandemic to suspend government procurement rules in favour of the VIP lane, where VIP literally meant friends of Conservative MPs or Conservative Party donors and wasted billions on equipment that didn't work, just so they could enrich their friends.

The Conservative Party will choose tax cuts for the wealthiest above investment in public services every day of the week, every week of the year, every year of the decade and every decade of the century and every century of their existence, because the purpose of the Conservative Party is to keep money and power with the rich and established and away from the poor and the working class.

I thought "this isn't new, it's been banned in those months for ages", then I read on and saw that it was binned by the Conservatives as part of the post Brexit regulations bonfire. Idiots.

I think its main purpose is to turn the news agenda away from the economy.

Wasn't it a lovely WW2?!