More likely he'll be PM. The problem with Fleet Street (bar the two papers which are not right wing) is that they don't know when to give it a rest. They probably bear a portion of responsibility for the success he had at the last election. If you lampoon or demonise a politician often enough and people then actually see and hear him speak they do begin to see through the propaganda and vote against it. I look forward to them doing it all over again. That coupled with the fact that the Tories know only two tactics (Operation Fear and tax cuts) and show little signs of any unity or any willingness to get behind a credible politician who can replace the lady who is not for leaving. You forget that there is a large section of the population which does not remember living under 26% inflation, 3 day weeks and unions calling strikes every other day over tea breaks. On the other hand a large number of those who will be voting for the first time will know a lot of family and friends who work in the public sector or have relatives who have been treated in hospital over the last few winters of crisis and therefore know well that a large percentage of the population are worse off as a result of voting for a progressive free enterprise anything goes government. Many of them will be seduced by the message that Corbyn and his acolytes preach.
Fortunately there many people who remember life under Labour and Blair. People will remember the illegal war, boom and bust and the letter that was left. The Tories always have to clean up after a Labour government. For me, even the Tories in a mess is a far better option than letting Corbyn/Abbott and the rest of those despicable backbenchers in the Labour party anywhere near office.
Good point. However Blair presided over a government whose economic policy was as free market as you could get. And you ignore at your peril that it was the likes of Benn and Corbyn who were the lone voices of opposition to war. Blair was a warmonger who was backed to the hilt by the Tories. They did not challenge the case or ask for evidence. Nor did Fleet Street. Corbyn and Benn did. So even on that score, Corbyn can position himself very favourably should the media turn the spotlight on the role he played. On the boom and bust point, most people have seen through that fallacy that the it was the fault of Gordon Brown's policies. The global economic crisis was caused by bankers and profiteers steeped in the traditions of an unregulated financial sector doing what comes naturally to anyone whose sole motive in life is to make as much as he or she can as quickly as possible for as long as he or she can get away with it. As I said it was a free market economic policy with zero regulation, a regime first introduced by Lawson, the man responsible for the crash in the late 80s when he abolished multiple mortgage tax relief. Sound. Corbyn hasn't ****ed up the economy because he hasn't been given the opportunity to do so. I dare say you're spot on that he will if given that chance. However given the stark choice between someone who peddles the myth that if you soak the rich and refocus economic benefits on the poor everything will be fine and a party who can only say that there is no magic money tree and you can't trust that lot and we will continue with austerity, I'd be very wary of predicting the outcome As we know the great British public don't always vote the way you or I might expect them to.
Somewhere between 45,000 and 80,000 kids in the U.K. are ‘home schooled’. The vast majority may turn out to be fully rounded human beings making a contribution to society, and you only tend to hear about them when something goes tragically wrong, like the kid who died of scurvy after neglect by his hippie parents or the girl who was hauled off a plane on the way to Syria who wanted to be a doctor but was surrounded at home by images of beheadings and jihadist propaganda. Obviously many kids who go to school are neglected or abused at home and many turn out as wrong uns. But although I know it’s foolish to overgeneralise I find myself deeply uncomfortable about home schooling. Challenging questions about what ‘rights’ parents have over their children.
I share your discomfort, Stan. I am totally behind the parents’ right to choose what is best for their children, but us yoomans are supposed to be social animals too, so parents also have a duty, I feel, to ensure their offspring are properly equipped to interact with wider society. I’m no expert, but I suspect subjecting your kids to images of jihadist beheadings doesn’t necessarily achieve this in the way most of us would wish.
I'm shocked that home-schooled children fall off government radar completely, and there is currently no registration scheme or even light monitoring in such cases. I don't want Big Brother, but registration and an annual check is surely not to much for parents of these children to accept, if only to prevent the terrible child cruelty and deaths that a totally informal system has led to.
To produce “foie gras” (the French term means “fatty liver”), workers ram pipes down the throats of male ducks twice each day, pumping up to 2.2 pounds of grain and fat into their stomachs, or geese three times a day, up to 4 pounds daily, in a process known as “gavage.” The force-feeding causes the birds’ livers to swell to up to 10 times their normal size. Many birds have difficulty standing because their engorged livers distend their abdomens, and they may tear out their own feathers and attack each other out of stress. Labour want to ban the practice. Good on them. The government want to ban it. Good on them. Of course, at the moment, we can't ban this cruel practice because the EU (under the firm thumb of the French agricultural industry) would prevent us. It's an EU approved practice. But here's the good news... Once we leave the EU, we can ban it. please log in to view this image
They use Geese mainly for this however It’s called farming and the U.K. will be happy eating all other food influences from around the world while pretending we invented them Of course we need to dress them up in packages made of plastic to fool ourselves The majority of pharmaceuticals produced now are in fact for our food industries I have killed many animals in my life and I have eaten them. Fed my family only last week with a bonus large sea trout caught from my garden ...
No, this practice is not farming, at least not decent farming. It's animal torture. Decent farming should involve animal welfare. I too have killed animals and eaten them. I'm not a vegetarian, but I believe in giving farm animals quality of life and a humane death. I'd also ban slaughter without stunning in abatoirs
Definitely ban the killing without stunning As a minimum the food produced this way should be labeled as such
Whilst I’m not against home schooling per se, I find myself questioning the motives of the parents doing this. I do wonder whether some of these parents are themselves introverted or extraordinarily fearful of the outside world such that they take such extreme measures to protect their offspring. Perhaps paranoia is involved. This could certainly explain the jihadist mentality, as the steps they take to ‘protect’ their children from the idea that they might one day think for themselves seem to be a consequence of this.
Have you ever eaten any Goldie? It’s very tasty (incredibly rich, you don’t need much) but in my view not better than many other pates and it certainly doesn’t justify the production methods (I don’t eat any pate nowadays, too much salt and fat for my aging constitution). Likewise with veal - I can’t tell the difference between white and the more ethically sound rose veal, and neither are as tasty as proper aged beef. But we don’t need to passively wait for Brexit and Michael ‘Animal Rights’ Gove to save us. Simply don’t eat any don’t shop in places that stock it and don’t eat in restaurants that serve it (while the government can’t ban it the EU can’t force anyone to stock/serve it). Sainsbury’s sell it, but Waitrose don’t, they sell something called Faux Gras which is from free range geese in Norfolk. Apparently geese naturally stuff themselves stupid at certain times of year, engorge their own livers on purpose.
I used to work with a lovely Northern Irish bloke who was a member of a very fundamentalist Protestant sect. He never talked about it or forced his views on anyone, but his kids were home schooled and this was clearly about shielding them from a sinful world. However benign and gentle this bloke was (and he was a excellent manager of people) he was imposing an ideology, a worldview, on his kids which I struggle with.
There have been mixed results from home schooling. The successes generally involve highly academic parents who feel, sometimes with justification, that they can do a better technical job for their kids than teachers. There are Oxbridge candidates that have been home schooled. But I wonder how well rounded these academically successful students are. Learning in school is not restricted to lessons after all. Learning to interact with peers, and thus learning about oneself is hugely important. And then there's sport and physical exercise. Light-touch government monitoring in these cases would be positive imo. And then, as you say, Uber, there are the other cases. Kids that are brought up in jihadist households, exposed to dogma and terrible images of torture and beheading etc by their parents. And other kids bought up in Dickensian conditions, with cruelty and injustice, sometimes starved or beaten to death. This can actually happen in Britain today.
Exactly. Whether you like it and then choose to eat it is a matter of individual choice, although your medic may have something to say about it to you. Not sure what it has to do with the EU. And I doubt it is as high up on their agenda as it may be on Michael Gove's. No issue of conscience because one taste was enough for me. As with pate I didn't like it.
I won't eat it, Stan, or veal. I like to know the animals I eat have had a good life at least. Sure, others can avoid it, but I wonder how many really think about it. No criticism but people will say - I shouldn't eat it really, but it tastes nice... I'm hopeful that real progress can be made in the conditions animals are kept over the next decade. Once we're out of the EU, the UK can lead the way.
It has a lot to do with the EU. It's a cruel practice that should be stopped, and the UK government and Opposition want to ban it. Until we leave, this ban would breach EU laws and we'd face punitive sanctions.
