Off Topic Politics Thread

you either worked that out to the exact month or are aging faster than me! (I'm gonna have to some research now)

 

I was 19 when Thatcher came to power in May 1979, and 30 when she was finally deposed in Nov 1990

 

Maths is not my strong point. Born in 1961, a year after you by the sounds of it

 

kid

 

I was 9 (nearly 10) when she came into power and 21 when she finally went. Never got to vote her in or out as in May 1987 I was still 17.

 

I think Michael Foot was my favorite opposition to Margaret Thatcher. He was slaughtered in the 83 election. He had some interesting policies that have some relevance today:
The 1983 Labour manifesto, strongly socialist in tone, advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher personal taxation and a return to a more interventionist industrial policy. The manifesto also pledged that a Labour government would abolish the House of Lords, nationalise banks and immediately withdraw from the then-European Economic Community

 

I think I voted for him for unilateral nuclear disarmament, didn't know then and don't know now what interventionist industrial policy is / was. and as for Brexit 83 ...

 

mind you, we'd have probably recovered from it by now!

 

An example of interventionist industrial policy would be, say, ensuring that when the railways updated all their rolling stock, a British company, such as Bombardier, gets the contract.

Thus creating jobs in the UK, rather than buying trains made in Germany that are then transported through the channel tunnel. If you leave everything to the free market, investors get a better deal but the taxpayer often doesn't - even when the investor is the taxpayer.

 

Bombardier have just lost an appeal against a decision awarding a massive contract to Siemens.
Siemens to their credit say they will build the trains in the UK, creating jobs, but that is only good if Bombardier doesn’t lose staff as a result.

 

If Siemans are planning to build some trains in the UK, that would certainly be welcome, but all the class 700s currently being rolled out on the Thameslink/Great Northern network were built in Germany and brought in via the tunnel.

The Queen Mary II was built in Germany, by a French company. I wonder how Harland and Wolff felt about that?

 

Bombardier is of course a Canadian company.

 

Doesn't really matter who the parent company is. The point is Bombardier have several plants in the UK, and that's where the manufacturing jobs would have been created.

 

Is Brexit just a game to wealthy people?
Aaron Banks, having bankrolled the Leave campaign, now indicating that he would have supported Remain, if he could turn the clock back.

 

Likely, many of them genuinely believed that the EU would just roll over and give the UK everything the government wanted, and are now coming to the realization that it isn't going to happen. Granted, no one should have actually believed it, but it's better that they're belatedly seeing related than sticking doggedly with a belief that is divorced from reality.

 

Doggedly? See what you did there.

 

I’m not an MP, nor am I as knowledgeable about politics as many others, but even I could see that the EU would make life as difficult as possible for us, or any other country, to leave.
Common sense tells you that if the U.K. were given an easy exit, getting most of what they asked for, others would likely have followed suit, which would be an end to the EU.

 

I heard a terrific comment the other day. The only way to see the sense in Brexit is to realise that every single thing that's been done so far (even back to the decision to hold the referendum) has been done in order to keep the Tory Party in one piece. It makes literally no sense economically but it keeps them whole. Which is all they care about. Generally wealthy, the people at the top of the Tories are utterly insulated from the economic effects so they can focus on keeping power.

Vin