The I cant believe it’s not politics thread.

[Daggers]

1 hour ago, Alf Bentley said:

 

I'd like to believe that - and Truss seems of a very low calibre on a personal level.

 

There's a reason the fruitloop right have got behind her - she's malleable and quite flexible when it comes to opinions if it furthers her ambition. They see her as a decent vehicle to follow on from Johnson, especially as she doesn't have the compulsion of needing to be liked. Sunak knows his own mind and is far more intelligent.

 

I'm very concerned about the next two years. They're going to try to push through a lot of repressive shit.

[Foxdiamond]

The number of Tory members is amazingly low at around 160,000. Labour is about 415,000. I wonder why so many voters identify with Tory policies. The country has suffered with our voting system. Most of us don't want large majority Tory governments but this small group hold power over us year on year. Then the media slags off Unions as a threat to democracy 

[taupe]

edit.... dun't matter

Edited 29 July 2022 by taupe

[The Horse's Mouth]

11 minutes ago, Foxdiamond said:

The number of Tory members is amazingly low at around 160,000. Labour is about 415,000. I wonder why so many voters identify with Tory policies. The country has suffered with our voting system. Most of us don't want large majority Tory governments but this small group hold power over us year on year. Then the media slags off Unions as a threat to democracy 

Labour membership is a lot cheaper I think, also I think you're more enticed to get involved if you're into changing the status quo 

[Voll Blau]

1 hour ago, gerblod said:

There's a wide gulf between being an electable party and a serious party of government. Gordon Brown was ridiculed, chastised and scapegoated for being PM in the meltdown following the Lehman brothers subprime mortgage bankruptcy. That was a global economic event in its domino effect, yet the British public had to have a head on a pole. That led to the most incompetent UK government possibly in history. 

I always believed that the failure of responsible voting in this country was down to political ignorance and a feeling of powerlessness amongst the electorate. But the popularity of Johnson proved that another factor is at work. For many, his irresponsibility, his lying and his ability to get away with both, his pomposity and his charisma/charm (although I cannot see either) were actually attractive. Voting him in was a gigantic f**k you to the Establishment (of which he is part!). That Establishment, from postwar Churchill through Eden, MacMillan, Home, Thatcher, Blair and Cameron, had been complicit or had failed to respect the social contract and the need to protect a large section of the citizens of this country from the worst effects of unrestricted capitalism.

We've been given money to spend on toys and told we're 'rich' but that wealth has been gradually channelled into fewer hands. Yet we still vote for Tories and college boy/girl New Labourites. Sam Tarry has my complete admiration, just as the 1984 miners' battle against Thatcher had. Being from Coalville, I saw the damage Thatcher's policies did to a huge swathe of communities over Northern England and Southern Scotland. She had no plan to help the soon-to-be unemployed - because she hated the working class.

Starmer is middle-class with good intentions... that won't come to fruition. I'd far rather see Rayner as leader, but wouldn't the press hound her into oblivion.

Starmer talks about growth, but how is that achievable without adding to global warming. It should be clear, even to the forelock-tuggers that the Conservative party is the 'I'm alright, Jack' party, with 160k mostly male, middle-class, Home Counties party members deciding who, between two of Johnson's failures, should fiddle while Rome burns.

The media have always turned on the big unions when they sense money will be directed away from shareholder dividends. They will isolate whichever group come asking for more. Aldi are trying to recruit staff by upping their hourly rate by 40p. I heard a delivery driver talking on R4 about his 17 hour day and how his family time was nonexistent. Is this what we envisaged our world would be in 2022? Polluted, overworked, foodbank reliant and nationally divided - with no politician with enough real leadership qualities apparent to begin repairing the country. 

 

 

 

You make some reasonable points, although Starmer has the most working-class cred of any Labour leader since Kinnock.

[Foxdiamond]

1 hour ago, The Horse's Mouth said:

Labour membership is a lot cheaper I think, also I think you're more enticed to get involved if you're into changing the status quo 

Fair point

[st albans fox]

have i entered a parallel universe where andrea rayner is being spoken of as a prospective PM ??

[Lionator]

3 hours ago, gerblod said:

Your anti-socialist petticoat is showing. You want squeaky clean apparatchiks representing Labour - not people with strategies to solve both the huge short-term and long-term problems confronting the country. When Britain was in dire straits post 1945 it took radical action to repair more than just the war damage. I see the same ills that afflicted the country pre-1939 manifesting in much the same way today.

As for loonies, one has only to look over the Tory benches to see them in abundance. Bridgen, Francois, Baker, Rees-Mogg, Patel, Johnson, Truss, Redwood (stiil crazy after all these years). At PMQ, when comparing one front bench to the other, the intelligence is all on the Labour side.

To be fair I don’t think you have to be a socialist to be on the side of the workers during an inflation led crisis. The Tories have basically vacated the middle ground so Labour will swing as far to the right as possible to get elected. 

[ealingfox]

42 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

have i entered a parallel universe where andrea rayner is being spoken of as a prospective PM ??

 

Probably, seeing as her name is Angela.

[st albans fox]

25 minutes ago, ealingfox said:

 

Probably, seeing as her name is Angela.

I think that actually  helps make my point ! 

[kingkisnorbo]

On 27/07/2022 at 18:12, Leicester_Loyal said:

 

I love this bloke. 

I’d like to @ all the plums I’ve seen on here pissing and whinging about not being able to get a train somewhere. This will one day too affect you and you won’t  be so comfortable to eat your employers boots any longer. With any luck more will follow suit. 

[orangecity23]

Everything you need to know about Spiv Trust Liz Truss is that she wrote this pile of shite ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_Unchained ) along with Raab, Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng.

 

Quote

The book asserts that the UK has a "bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation". It then says:

The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.

So she thinks we are all idle, and need to work longer and retire later. She literally wants to steal your life away from you so you can slave away longer to pay for her and her Spivy friends to trouser every last penny they can at our expense. As for unions:

Quote

It says the UK should “stop indulging in irrelevant debates about sharing the pie between manufacturing and services, the north and the south, women and men”.

No need to worry about "sharing the Pie", it'll be an empty plate for all us plebs. Now we are "unchained" we can learn from the economies of USA, for it's "risk taking" (destroyed the entire World economy by constructing fradulent financial products leading up to 2008, whoops), or Japan for their approach to learning (burnt out Schoolkids studying 6 days a week, leading to people dying at their desks from overwork, to pay off 50 year mortgages in an economy where growth has been non-existant for 2 decades due to massively inflated house prices, whoops).

 

So that's what we've got to look forward to. American healthcare prices, the "aspiration" of Indian level wages and Japanese working hours and mortgage payments. You'll die sooner, be poorer and get bled dry for cash any time you are ill. All so some feckless lying Spiv can profit with her greasy Oxbridge PPE chums and their billionaire donors, asset stripping an entire country and it's people. The political landscape of this country is corrupt as fook, and this current iteration of the Conservative party has been completely overrun by conmen and fraudsters.

[gerblod]

23 hours ago, kenny said:

There are plenty of loonies in the labour ranks, starmer has removed them from the front bench.

 

It's nothing to do with anti socialism, it's competance. Whether you agree with his message or not, it's clear he has a better chance of delivering it than Rayner.

 

I appreciate you disagree and if you are a labour member you can vote her in of that's what you think is best. Starmer is better electorally and would be better in government.

Not a Labour member - I was until Corbyn's anti-EU stance came to light. I was initially pleased with Starmer's election as leader, but he's, apparently, not seeing the global, long-term picture. Global warming is going to affect our temperate climate in ways which sub-tropical populations are experiencing now. So touting productivity, unless it's emphasising minimising all forms of fossil fuel (and other power source) emissions, isn't going to cut it. It's short-term, inward-looking and head-in-the-sand blindness.

For me, the word loony is used by right wing politicians and media to scaremonger. Before Covid hit the abuse levelled at Corbyn and McDonnell was all about their 'mad' economic policies. Now Hammond's careful austerity measures have been thrown out of the window - all kinds of monetary  irresponsibility, bordering on criminality, were instigated and initiated by Johnson & Co. - the waste of which is now reported in the public domain. I suspect that Corbyn, for all his 'looniness' would have handled the pandemic crisis with far more authority than did the panicking Govt. 

Any Labour government has the added burden of the Sun, the Mail, the Express and the Telegraph continually bending the nation's ears about their supposed extremism. When I hear conservatives virtually exploding with rage about the cost of socialist economic intemperance I remind myself that £800 quid a roll wallpaper is about £775 quid more than Wickes charge for a roll and I could construct a tree house for about £149,500 less than BoJo wanted to spend on his - with your and my money.

 

[gerblod]

22 hours ago, Voll Blau said:

You make some reasonable points, although Starmer has the most working-class cred of any Labour leader since Kinnock.

In 'reasonable' times I'd welcome Starmer, just as I welcomed Kinnock. But our system is just unrepresentative and any radical approaches to containing the worst excesses of capitalism and the global damage it's causing are just negated by a voting system which leaves a significant number of voters without a voice in Parliament. 

[st albans fox]

12 hours ago, orangecity23 said:

Everything you need to know about Spiv Trust Liz Truss is that she wrote this pile of shite ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_Unchained ) along with Raab, Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng.

 

So she thinks we are all idle, and need to work longer and retire later. She literally wants to steal your life away from you so you can slave away longer to pay for her and her Spivy friends to trouser every last penny they can at our expense. As for unions:

No need to worry about "sharing the Pie", it'll be an empty plate for all us plebs. Now we are "unchained" we can learn from the economies of USA, for it's "risk taking" (destroyed the entire World economy by constructing fradulent financial products leading up to 2008, whoops), or Japan for their approach to learning (burnt out Schoolkids studying 6 days a week, leading to people dying at their desks from overwork, to pay off 50 year mortgages in an economy where growth has been non-existant for 2 decades due to massively inflated house prices, whoops).

 

So that's what we've got to look forward to. American healthcare prices, the "aspiration" of Indian level wages and Japanese working hours and mortgage payments. You'll die sooner, be poorer and get bled dry for cash any time you are ill. All so some feckless lying Spiv can profit with her greasy Oxbridge PPE chums and their billionaire donors, asset stripping an entire country and it's people. The political landscape of this country is corrupt as fook, and this current iteration of the Conservative party has been completely overrun by conmen and fraudsters.

Evidently they were responsible for different parts of the book. raab wrote the stuff about the lazy workforce. 
im not sure what bit she wrote - probably drew the pictures …..

[Foxdiamond]

5 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

Evidently they were responsible for different parts of the book. raab wrote the stuff about the lazy workforce. 
im not sure what bit she wrote - probably drew the pictures …..

She does seem to be thick but not in a harmless way. I think we should all be worried about further cuts to public services and attacks on welfare. She appeals to that nasty right wing element that are pulling the strings. These are the loons

[Finnaldo]

Catching up on this thread, I wish people actually understood interventionism and laissez-faire economics, neither are left or right positions. We’ve had interventionist Conservative governments historically, before Labour was even a Parliamentary party. Boris and this current government are not ‘Consocialist’ or have ‘left-wing policy’, they’ve just been extremely interventionist.  

[urban.spaceman]

 the activist who harassed Starmer in Liverpool the other day has been kicked out of the membership because she was a member of a proscribed group.

[Parafox]

8 hours ago, Foxdiamond said:

She does seem to be thick but not in a harmless way. I think we should all be worried about further cuts to public services and attacks on welfare. She appeals to that nasty right wing element that are pulling the strings. These are the loons

She's a self-proclaimed Thatcherite. Tells you all you need to know. Thatcher wasn't "thick" but was ultra right wing and as damaging to the "working class" as Truss will be.

Maybe the only difference might be the hints about being a tax-cutting Tory leader. The reversal of the NI rise sounds appealing but then how do the Gov fund social care, NHS etc.?

Are the tax cuts mainly aimed at the wealthiest? Will the average joe still have the same percentage of their pay taken in tax? Tax cuts always seem to favour the wealthy as the cuts are usually a percentage of your salary. A cut of 10% tax on £100,000 is much more than 10% on £25,000.

Edited 30 July 2022 by Parafox

[foxile5]

Starmer standing against working people is a weird stand. 

 

Seems likely to alienate the exact electorate he'd want to court. 

[Lionator]

2 hours ago, foxile5 said:

Starmer standing against working people is a weird stand. 

 

Seems likely to alienate the exact electorate he'd want to court. 

Nope, alienating the trade unions will probably strike a chord with the ‘red wall’ type voter (which shows how utterly fecked our society is). 

[NasPb]

3 hours ago, foxile5 said:

Starmer standing against working people is a weird stand. 

 

Seems likely to alienate the exact electorate he'd want to court. 

He's right wing, not a surprise. A liberal economically. Do agree that tactically it's not a good move lol. I bet abstention goes up next elections. Conservatives will still win.. Neoliberalism and fighting to the right dancing with conservatives ain't the answer. Only actually policies with a leader who is principled and doesn't fall into being wishy washy will win. Morals are needed 

[fox_up_north]

What makes you say Starmer is right wing? 

[Lionator]

4 minutes ago, fox_up_north said:

What makes you say Starmer is right wing? 

Yeah I don’t agree with that at all. Moving into the vacant centre ground is absolutely the right thing to do to win the next election. None of their so far proposed policies are particularly right wing, especially the VAT on private school fees which we discussed on here but seemed to fly under the radar in the mainstream. That’s a left wing economic policy. 

[Mike Oxlong]

https://news.sky.com/story/nadine-dorries-retweet-branded-dangerous-by-mp-as-tory-leadership-campaign-gets-nasty-12662646

 

No comment required !