Off Topic Politics Thread

He has all the behavioural traits of a clinical narcissist. Absolute self involvement, lack of empathy, inability to listen to others, no sense of what is and what isn't appropriate. The guy's a sociopath, not even borderline.

 

An unhappy coincidence, due to Brexit.

According to a report in the Financial Times “economic growth is already falling by a reported 0.9% or £350million a week“.

Not sure if it is actually falling by 0.9 or if that is the growth, down from the predicted 1%, so figures might be spurious.

Ignore me,

 

Not at all worrying that he is in charge of nuclear weapons.

(I wouldn't leave him in charge of a water pistol)

 

The thing I love about Brexit is it stops people who aren't football fans asking me how I can like a sport where money values have got so distorted. Jeez, football clubs are penny pinchers compared to a mad bunch happy that we're pissing away billions on a distorted ideology.

The sad thing is, these non-football fans have a choice about whether to stay with it or not. With Brexit I have none, other than to leave the country.

Picking up what I said on a thread about Puel, this is another piece of evidence that my position of "You've got to be ****ing joking" on Brexit seems the only sane response.

 

Dear Russia
Please don’t trespass in British waters until we have at least one, of our six destroyers sea worthy.
Thank you in advance.
The Royal Navy


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...avy-type-45-destroyers-moored-Portsmouth.html

 

Damien Green has resigned. Don't know what took him so long: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42434802

 

He also displays psychotic behavioural patterns.

 

I don't accuse the BBC of being a "fake news outlet." They are just guilty (as many modern media outlets are) of knowingly misrepresenting the truth, not reporting the full facts and ignoring stuff that doesn't back up the modern "acceptable" viewpoint.

The main problem with the BBC is not that they are any worse than other outlets but their market dominance gives them a virtual monopoly. The other problem is that they themselves as well as many people of the same viewpoint hold them up as the beacon to which all other outlets in the world should see as the pinnacle of neutrality. They promote themselves as this beacon and as seen within this thread many many people actually believe it is true.

So my main problem with the BBC is not so much the content but the dominance the BBC has.

 

Spot on with that assessment. The last bit is key though. The BBC is under pressure to produce a huge amount of content but that is its own fault. They keep banging on about having to reduce costs and they are always on about monopolies in the market yet it is the BBC itself that is constantly trying to increase its hold on the media market. Not just the telly but the BBC website, radio, BBC dominates everywhere and far from reducing its dominance it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger self promoting itself constantly as it does so.

They have no need to be under the pressure to produce so much content. They shouldn't be the country's only exemption from market competition rules where they can just continue to expand and expand.

 

I agree. Also it doesn't stand to reason that BRs failings could not have been addressed within the public sector as other countries do. Lack of investment. I wouldn't suggest that private ownership has improved things at all. X billions of investment doesn't really detail what you get for the money. They could detail £20bn invested on track improvements but it wouldn't count if they had spent it on painting the top of the rails each day as it wore off.

I would back JRM 100% to return the railways to public ownership.

 

They're still rattling dirty carriages. Same now as they were back then IME. The trains I have been on this year (to Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham) were no different to how they used to be apart from being cleaner on the outside and not dark blue. To be honest I couldn't care less how dirty the outside of the carriage is. They should be spending more money on improvements to the service.

 

The railways have never been the same since the Beeching cuts all those years ago. Private ownership is not necessarily the answer..........

 

Lots of comment on the doom and gloom side of things. Why does no-one ever report on the positives? UK export growth is way ahead of the EU. Can;t always pick up on the pro-remain supporting facts and ignore anything that doesn't suit.

 

It's rare I go on trains now but when I have they have been much better inside. My main point is that I think if (big if) we have spare money for this then I would rather it was spent on social care - For the many not the few.

 

That's not a positive.

Exports are increasing but growth in imports isn't and final household consumption has had a large decrease in growth.

Basically UK citizens can't afford their own good anymore so business owners are making their profit selling outside the uk.

I'm a big believer in infrastructure investment. Better transport means more good delivered further and more workers delivered further so you can build more factories, buisnesses and houses further away utilising more land. There's not much that benefits more people than improved transport links imo.

 

It depends what area of society you are looking at. It's not much use if you are either stuck in hospital unable to be moved out because there are no spare places or stuck at home unable to get the care you need to function on a daily basis. Social care will affect most people at some point and has been neglected for far too long. The hospitals have loads of people in them that should be elsewhere which would free up beds for others. There's a knock on effect. In an ideal world we could spend money on everything but unfortunately that doesn't exist so choices have to be made.

Network Rail is state owned so they already deal with the infrastructure. It is possible that some money may be made out of the railways in the future (but by no means certain) which could be used elsewhere but I would expect it to be just ploughed back into the business to keep it running, hopefully better. HS2 is supposed to be delivering on the things you mention when/if it goes ahead.

Unfortunately, It all comes down to money and priorities in the end.

Sorry I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about social care.

 

Its incredibly important in that situation as the care has to come to you. Improving infrastructure both speeds up the delivery of care, reduces the cost of delivering care, and increases the amount of money (due to improved economy) available to be put into care. In terms of railway the direct impact won't be that big for hospitals past the impact on the production and movement costs of medicine. But as i said, improving infrastructure gives such wide ranging benefits that it pretty much improves everything indirectly as well. The hard part is weighing that improvement against the cost of improving it to see which is greater.

The greatest nations in history have achieved their greatness through transport. The Romans had their roads, the Americans had their trains and the British had their navy.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42394209

Some tips to get you through the Brexit chat this Christmas - Good Luck!

 

So we're switching back to the iconic blue passport. Apparently you have to be over 45(?) to have owned one, so over 50% of the population would have never done so. Probably(hopefully) keeping all the common machine readable format and functionality the EU passport introduced so really it will just be an EU passport painted blue. Costing £500m to replace them, more than the extra money given to the NHS this winter. But so long as the elderly nationalists are happy...

(there was also no obligation to keep a burgundy passport under EU rules either)

 

I am very fond of my burgundy EU passport and would like to keep it.